The Latest from the LHC : Last period of proton running for 2010.

I seemed to have missed a couple of posts at the LHC. They are now shut down for the winter and have finished their heavy ion (lead nucleus) collisions.

Here is the main page.

and 4 articles
Successful switch to ions.
The success of the lead ion run continues.
A well-deserved break.
2010 ion run: completed!

Not been keeping an eye on this. These 2 posts are from 17/01 and 31/01. The LHC will be up and running again soon.

Even accelerators need a break.

The shutdown work nearing completion.

Not the LHC but related.

Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.

Found here.

Interesting. Only a 3-sigma event but looking promising.

And definitely not a (or the) Higgs particle.

The LHC is being fired up again but no new news as of yet.

I'm not neglecting this thread but there have been no official new from the LHC for a while now.
Very unusual. I assume they're working hard to get it up and running.
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
Not seen 'movable devices allowed in' as true so no science being done.

I have found this link about how the commissioning is going.
http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/

On the 21/04/11 they broke the world record for luminosity.
It was held by the Tevatron at 4.024e32 cm-2s-1.

They are now at triple the world record with 1.26e33 cm-2s-1 (or 12.6e32) as of 29/05/11. (I think the unit is barns)

I've also found a link to the dashboard. The Homepage has some of this info as well.

You can watch live data as it happens. Not very exciting I know but the text comment can be revealing.

I saw "lost beams    again" on sunday. I could feel the frustration in those words.

There seems to be plenty of science going on but still no official press releases.

Been checking out the LHC dashboard lately and they've been doing Machine Development (MD, it took me ages to work out this abbr.) and had a power cut on Sun 10th July. And homepage.

They've been ramping up powers again and are at about 1/10 of their max as of today on fill number 1945. Some science being done but mainly MD. I have found this link to their internal news but I haven't got power point installed so can't see the meeting results.

I think I understand the graphs in the dashboard now. Intensity is how many protons per beam, energy is the power in the magnets accelerating the beam. Bunch intensities is how many protons per bunch (one vertical line or bucket). A bucket is a time slot in the 27km ring measured in micro seconds (at a fair fraction of the speed of light the beams go around the 27km ring fairly quickly).

Please ask questions if you want to know more. I work on the idiom of you understand a subject more when you have to explain it to someone else.

This has been a "back burner" interest of mine for quite some time now, especially when it comes to laughing at the "YouTube idiots" who post those Doomsday videos about the LHC creating a "micro black hole" which will undoubtedly swallow up the entire solar system. I saw one video last year that tied the LHC into the "12/23/2012 end of the world" crap, by indicating that that's the date that the LHC will finally be running at full power. Maybe YouTube is the "Hub of Bull".

The LHC magnets are designed to go to 7TeV. They're only running at 3.5TeV for the next couple of years. After that there will be a major upgrade and then will go to full power. I think they may miss the 2012 deadline 
This is the most complex machine humans have built and they're still trying to work out the problems of running it.
It also has the biggest magnet ever built (in size and energy stored in it). So big it was built in 3 sections and assembled on site.

Quote from: DaveMorton on July 15, 2011, 03:08:27 AM
This has been a "back burner" interest of mine for quite some time now, especially when it comes to laughing at the "YouTube idiots" who post those Doomsday videos about the LHC creating a "micro black hole" which will undoubtedly swallow up the entire solar system. I saw one video last year that tied the LHC into the "12/23/2012 end of the world" crap, by indicating that that's the date that the LHC will finally be running at full power. Maybe YouTube is the "Hub of Bull".

I'm with Dave, am interested in the LHC, like to keep up to date on what's happening, Thanks to Snowy we can quite easily.

Maybe we should have a thread for plain stupid videos on YouTube, that might be a laugh . 

Quote from: Data on July 15, 2011, 12:29:44 PM
I'm with Dave, am interested in the LHC, like to keep up to date on what's happening, Thanks to Snowy we can quite easily.

Maybe we should have a thread for plain stupid videos on YouTube, that might be a laugh . 

That's not a bad idea, Data! I'll go in search of some of my "personal favorites", and have them ready, should we go forward with this suggestion.

I wish you could turn off the comments on You Tube.

You can only turn off the comments and prevent people from making them on your own videos. 

Is that what you mean Freddy?