This has already been batted around a bit, but for those of you who depend on CV for absolutely all of your news, there is a new US/LHC website, brought to you by the collective US institutions involved in the Large Hadron Collider. Like any hip contemporary internet presence, it comes complete with a blog. A group blog, in fact, featuring four physicists working on different aspects of the LHC: Monica Dunford, Pamela Klabbers, Steve Nahn, and Peter Steinberg. (I thought Peter already had a blog, but apparently some people can’t be confined to just one.) It’s great that we’ll get more inside scoop about what is happening at the LHC, in addition to the awesome scoop you can already get here and elsewhere.
There has been some fretting that the LHC, scheduled to turn on next year, is already getting too much hype. On the list of my own personal worries, this does not crack the top million. If you’re someone who reads several physics blogs and scans the Science Times and the wire services for stories about particle physics, you may have been subjected to a lot of stories about an experiment that hasn’t yet collected any data. But the more casual reader is very far from reaching a point of LHC over-exposure. This is by far the most important experiment in the last thirty years in an undeniably significant subfield of physics. The excitement is perfectly justified, and there will be much more to come.
The ATLAS cavern. Those poor particles won’t know what hit them!
Just FYI — that picture of the ATLAS cavern is 4 or 5 years old — here’s a picture of the cavern (and its contents) from the end of last year:
http://atlasexperiment.org/atlas_photos/selected-photos/full_detector/fde_gen_1006_003.jpg
What’s the tunnel overhead? Or is that a fish-eye distortion of some sort?
That’s how major pieces of equipment are lowered down.
I like this movie of a trip from space to the LHC to the ATLAS detector and inside.
Even cooler is this rotatable view. The grid of white lines on black you see before the view comes into being reminds me of the holodeck on Star Trek.
I heard some rumors floating around that there were some more – possibly major – complications found with the LHC commisioning.
Anyone else confirm or deny?
There have been some problems, but no disasters, despite some very incorrect rumors that “grew legs”, so to speak. No changes to the schedule have been announced or decided yet. If changes are made, the recent issues would more likely (guesswork here) result in relatively small changes (i.e. a couple of months rather than a year). Large problems are entirely possible between now and design luminosity running, but the recent ones are not of that scale.
why my comment was removed?
Sorry – I just realized I accidently erased it and can’t find it now. Please post it again. Sorry once more.
The link f15mos posted, http://simkiott001.blogspot.com, looks entirely correct to me. There’s certainly a variation in how serious the current problems are viewed to be (and likely will be until they are fixed). It is considered likely that the full present and future combination of issues will probably end up pushing the startup until at least the end of 2008, if not perhaps beyond. The PIM copper finger problems have been and are under intensive study. We’ll hear a lot more in the next couple weeks.
Just to note: I am clearly and most certainly _not_ any sort of official spokes-blog-commenter or anything of the sort. I comment only because no one else did and because there really is no public relations official or any specific person responsible for answering people’s questions on blogs. So please take what I say with a grain of salt just as you’d take any other anon/pseudonymous commenter (or named one). (The main reason why I am pseudonymous is that if/when I say something stupid, I don’t want to end up pilloried for it!) Cheers.
WordPress appears to have mistakenly added the comma to the end of that URL, http://simkiott001.blogspot.com
Hi Ellipsis,
Thanks for posting the link that I posted before. I started to suspect that the subject of vacuum fingers and resulting LHC delay is some kind of tabu and information is being censored.
Also, as I understand CERN council did not shift the schedule so I can surmise they either still evaluating the impact on the schedule or impact is negligible. The latter I doubt as beam on May 2008 is goal w/o any contingencies. So not to mention helium production.
I do not want to seem nasty, but what I hear from experts of all sort – first beam in the machine in September 2008. Now, in CDF it took 2 years to get physics quality data and that is with “old” detector and experienced personnel. Here we have humangous detectors and crowded collaborations so I do not see how the schedule of getting physics data can be more optimistic than at the Tevatron experiments.
So, this puts us in the beginning of 2011 when CMS&ATLAS are producing quality data.
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The minutes of the most recent LHC Installation Coordination Committee meeting appear to now be public, for those of you that want every detail from the experts. See especially the talks from Ray Veness on the plug-in module status and from Katy Foraz on the general coordination schedule. No announced updates to the latter yet, that will probably wait for Lyn Evans’s talk at the ATLAS Week next week.