CERN reiterates safety of LHC on eve of first beam

A report published today in the peer reviewed Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics provides comprehensive evidence that safety fears about the Large Hadron Collider are unfounded. The LHC is CERN's new flagship research facility. As the world's highest energy particle accelerator, it is poised to provide new insights into the mysteries of our universe.

"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."

Safety has been an integral part of the LHC project since its inception in 1994, and the project has been subject to numerous audits covering all aspects of safety and environmental impact. A comprehensive report by independent scientists addressing safety issues related to the production of new particles at the LHC was presented to CERN's governing body, the CERN Council, in 2003. It concluded that the LHC is safe. This report was updated and its conclusions strengthened in a new report incorporating recent experimental and observational data that was presented to theCouncil at its most recent meeting in June 2008. This new report confirms and strengthens the conclusion of the 2003 report that there is no basis for any concern about the safety of the LHC. The CERN Council is composed of representatives of the governments of the 20 European Member States of CERN.

Read more

Add a first LHC beam
patch to your pajamas

Iron-on patches for the LHC first beam Pajama Party

Those registered to attend Wednesday's Pajama Party can get their LHC first beam patch this afternoon in the Office of Communication. Those who bring in their pajamas tomorrow can either pick up their patch or get their patch ironed on by Office of Communication staff.

Steps to the LHC startup

Magnets in the 27-km long tunnel. Image courtesy of CERN

Steps to starting up the LHC:
Cooling each of the machine's eight sectors to near absolute zero; electrical testing of 1,600 superconducting magnets; powering circuits of each sector; powering the eight independent sectors in unison; synchronization of the links in the accelerator chain; sending a bunch of particles partially around the ring in clockwise and then counter-clockwise beam tests; sending beam all the way around the ring both clockwise and counterclockwise; accelerating beam; making beams collide.

First beam:
On September 10, physicists at CERN plan to circulate a bunch of particles around the entire 17-mile LHC ring for the first time. Scientists will inject the particles at the energy of 0.45 TeV.

How much energy is a TeV?
Physicists use the unit electron volt to describe how much energy a particle has. An electron volt is the kinetic energy gained by a single, charged particle when it passes through an electrical field of one volt. One TeV equals 1 trillion electron volts, which equates to the acceleration provided by 1 trillion 1-volt batteries strung together. Watch this 4-minute video to learn more about electron volts and particle acceleration.

First collisions:
Later this year, physicists will accelerate the beams and make them collide. The plan is to accelerate beams both clockwise and counterclockwise to 5 TeV before the end of the year. The ultimate goal is to accelerate beams to 7 TeV. In comparison, the Tevatron accelerates each beam to 1 TeV.

Global computer network ready for Big Bang probe

From USA Today, Sept. 8, 2008

When scientists fire up the biggest physics experiment in history this week they will face a task that makes finding a needle in a haystack look simple.

Inside a 17-mile tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border they hope to detect evidence of extra dimensions, invisible "dark matter" and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.

Success in this $10 billion endeavor would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

But even the massive computing power at the European Organization for Nuclear Research can't sift through all the data that will pour in when its particle-smashing experiment begins on Wednesday.

So the Geneva-based lab, known by its old French acronym CERN, devised a way of sharing the burden among dozens of leading computing centers around the world.

The result is the "LHC Grid," a global network of 60,000 computers that will analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"This is the next step after the Web," says David Colling, a scientist at Britain's Imperial College, which is contributing to the Grid. "Except that unlike the Web, you're sharing computing power and not files."

That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data produced when four giant detectors - 10 times more accurate than any previous instruments - begin measuring activity at the subatomic level.

"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," explains CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the Grid project.

Read more