The purpose of this blog was to showcase other types of physics other than the LHC. But I can't resist, this is a really nice animated video showing the stages of getting stationary protons up to 7TeV
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1125472
(via @CERN)
Showing posts with label lhc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lhc. Show all posts
Friday, 20 November 2009
Monday, 19 October 2009
There's more to the LHC than bloody black holes
The LHC is cold again. This is very exciting, and also it can't come soon enough. In the absence of any actual science going on an endless stream of bollocks seems to have been coming out about the collider. The latest being this drivel about things coming from the future to... oh God I can't be bothered. It rather upsets me that the only things people really know about the LHC are that it might make a black hole and maybe something is coming through time to sabotage it. So I thought I'd talk about why this machine is ridiculously fantastic and complicated (the more likely cause of breakage).
One of the features of synchrotrons that I've always thought is amazing is the way they cool the beams. By cool I'm not talking about temperature around the beam pipe (although that's bloody cold too so that the magnets work). I'll quickly describe what it is and how people solve it, although I'm still not 100% sure how they've solved it at the LHC.
Our general collider accelerates particles around a ring using strong electric fields. The particles are bent into a circle by bending magnets and they are kept in a beam by the focussing quadropole magnets. The effect of these magnets is that if a particle is heading sideways out of the beam then they push it back in in the opposite direction. In this way the particles kind of snake around the course never straying too far out of line. The task of cooling the beam is to reduce this snaking as much as possible so that we have a really dense, straight running beam.
One of the features of synchrotrons that I've always thought is amazing is the way they cool the beams. By cool I'm not talking about temperature around the beam pipe (although that's bloody cold too so that the magnets work). I'll quickly describe what it is and how people solve it, although I'm still not 100% sure how they've solved it at the LHC.
Our general collider accelerates particles around a ring using strong electric fields. The particles are bent into a circle by bending magnets and they are kept in a beam by the focussing quadropole magnets. The effect of these magnets is that if a particle is heading sideways out of the beam then they push it back in in the opposite direction. In this way the particles kind of snake around the course never straying too far out of line. The task of cooling the beam is to reduce this snaking as much as possible so that we have a really dense, straight running beam.
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