
First successful beam at record energy of 6.5 TeV - jonbaer
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/04/first-successful-beam-record-energy-65-tev
======
vowelless
This is awesome!

I highly recommend 'Particle Fever', in case you haven't seen it yet. It
cover's the LHC before the shutdown and restart, which included the Higgs
boson discovery. Just fascinating look into what an international
collaboration of human beings can accomplish.

IMDB:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385956/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385956/)

Trailer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rikc7foqvRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rikc7foqvRI)

Netflix:
[http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70296323?trkid=13752289](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70296323?trkid=13752289)

~~~
cpg
The recent reviews at the Netflix link are _priceless_ :)

~~~
oneel
Some highlights: mealy-mouthed malcontents

BIG-BANG-BELIEVING-BABBLERS

dead darkness drool that drips from the drooping face

Every fickle frame is filled with the foul stench of arrogant atheists

sad little men sit in the silent abyss of spiritual darkness wearing their
dirty diapers of despair

dead-dogma doctrines

best movie ever, could use moar magnets

Though now as I go back through, some of the more ridiculous comments seem to
be disappearing...

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I need a t shirt with "sit in the silent abyss of darknes wearing their dirty
diapers of despair"

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keehun
Here's the dashboard updated in real-time if this sort of thing fascinates you
(as it fascinates me!)

[http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...](http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php)

~~~
waterlesscloud
That's pretty cool. Is there anywhere that explains what it all means?

~~~
espinchi
Yes and no.

Yes: there's a link called "Doc" on the bottom of the page. This is the one
for LHC Page 1, which is the most important display: [http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/Doc/LHC1.p...](http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/Doc/LHC1.pdf)

No: well, you may only understand it if you have some background knowledge in
some particle physics terms.

------
hhsnopek
Could someone explain the significance of this, for those of us that don't
know?

~~~
krohling
The LHC just doubled it's power. While only operating at 50% it discovered
several new particles including the Higgs Boson. Now that it's nearing 100%
they're hoping to discover physics beyond the Standard Model. That could
include things like additional spatial dimensions, Dark Matter, microscopic
black holes and more.

TLDR: Hopefully opening the door for some mind blowing discoveries.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Microscopic black holes scares me. I once heard (entirely anecdotal - I'd love
it if someone more knowledgeable on the subject could comment) they had
calculated the probability that the LHC would create a black hole that
consumed the Earth. The result was more likely than SHA1-hash collision, and
was deemed safe enough to try. Somewhere between humorous and scary.

edit: did some Googling and found some documentation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-
energy_particle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-
energy_particle_collision_experiments)). It cites an estimated upper limit of
1 in 50 million and references the book in which that estimate is made.

~~~
davesque
I can't see how this would be a problem even if a black hole _was_ created.

A black hole is no different than any other massive object in that it doesn't
exert any stronger pull than its mass allows for. In other words, if the Sun
suddenly turned into a black hole right now, we would not get "sucked" into
it. The Earth would continue orbiting at the same period and distance. Of
course, it would suck (no pun intended) not to have sunlight but hey, maybe
the energy emitted by the accretion disc would equal the energy output of the
sun :P! Of course, an accretion disc would probably take a while to form, so
we would probably be fucked anyway, but certainly not because we would be
sucked into the black hole.

Similarly, if the LHC created a black hole through its collisions, I can't see
how it would be that massive. If it's not very massive, then it's not a
threat. In fact, there are theories that support the notion that it would
evaporate rather quickly (via Hawking radiation). Of course, I don't have any
numbers on this and only have a laymen's knowledge of the physics involved.
Anyone care to comment with more info?

~~~
ufmace
Here's a summary I posted a few days ago of an article I found explaining why
it's absolutely impossible, not just unlikely, for the LHC to create a black
hole that destroys the earth:

[https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-the-lhc-make-
an-...](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-the-lhc-make-an-earth-
killing-black-hole-886d9e600c28)

TL:DR: 1.) If these miniature black holes exist, the Earth has been getting
hit by them for billions of years, and it’s still here. 2.) If you do create a
miniature black hole, they will decay, via Hawking Radiation, on ridiculously
small timescales. 3.) You can compute the rate at which a black hole eats
matter, and it’s not even close to being as small as the lifetime of our
planet

~~~
kamaal
>>Capturing 66,000 nucleons per second, how long will it take to get the black
hole up to even one kilogram? Three trillion years

Thanks for the wonderful article.

A small question. Is this rate of consumption linear? Correct me if I'm wrong,
the heavier the black hole gets, more and faster it can absorb matter. Of
course given there is matter around it.

~~~
ufmace
I'm not a physicist or anything, but the idea I'm getting from that is that
the event horizon of such a micro-black hole would be much smaller than a
subatomic particle. It's too small to actually draw anything into it from a
distance, so it would only be able to absorb something by running into it. The
rate of consumption can't increase until the mass gets large enough to
actually draw matter in from a greater distance than something like the size
of an atomic nucleus.

The article author calculated how big that would be, and the black hole would
reportedly need to accumulate about a billion tons of mass before it could
start to grow exponentially.

------
swamp40
And that's just one beam. There's a second beam, too - so they will crash into
each other at 13 Tev.

~~~
espinchi
Also, that's probably just a few bunches. (I'm guessing only one, but I may be
wrong.) Every bunch contains ~10^11 protons.

When LHC is running in full, a total of 2808 bunches per beam are expected to
be colliding there. That's a lot of energy.

------
trose
[http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/](http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/)

~~~
ehmmm
So the script checks if the variable _worldHasEnded_ isn't defined to see if
the world isn't destroyed. Hmm....

~~~
arethuza
I guess that's a valid use for a global variable then.

~~~
_abattoir
[https://www.youtube.com/v/tKdcjJoXeEY](https://www.youtube.com/v/tKdcjJoXeEY)

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egodemens
Wasn't there an article on HN earlier this week about a 6.5 <some unit> pulse
of energy being detected in space? It went on to suggest the possibility of
intelligent life out in the universe. Maybe it was just some time warped echo
from the LHC?

------
ehmmm
Weren't they aiming for 7 TeV?

~~~
thrownaway2424
It's so easy to be disappointed, isn't it? Fermilab had a .9TeV beam 30 years
ago, so that's only ~7x in three decades, basically nothing for people
accustomed to Moore's Law.

~~~
spacemanmatt
I will gladly accept mere incremental performance upgrades when my CPU speed
crosses the ole terahertz barrier.

------
humanarity
wooooooooooooooooo! congrats :) the screaming electrons live on. :) love that
classic HMI screen. Just waiting to read the status line "Organics detected in
reactor core." :) haha

~~~
zachalexander
What is that a reference to? Google links to here.

At first I wondered if it were this (Another World intro, 1991):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs)

~~~
cipherzero
I think it's a game. It sounds familiar; I was going to ask the same thing!

~~~
humanarity
:) Glad you like it. Yeah, "screaming electrons", "organics in the reactor"
\-- digital culture is awesome :)

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neals
How do they even create a 'beam of particles'?

~~~
cozzyd
Remember CRT's?

~~~
cnvogel
...or SLCs, "small lepton colliders" ;-)

------
ljoshua
So is that more or less than 1.21 gigawatts? ;)

~~~
xxxyy
I started some basic calculations in Google to find out what do you mean. So I
converted 6.5 TeV to about 1 microjoule, then typed '1.21 GW / 1 uJ' to find
out the beam intensity in particles/second, and realized that the first link
is the Wikipedia entry for 'DeLorean time machine'.

~~~
repsilat
(And the answer is that it's more than 1.21GW so long as they're sending
1.2x10^15 of them every second.)

