Largest Experiment Restarts After 3-year Upgrade

After all these years, I still love particle physics. What Is the Large Hadron Collider? CERN Restarts the World's Largest Particle Accelerator - CNET

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been called the largest experiment in human history.

After more than three years of inactivity, the Large Hadron Collider located on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva restarted on Friday shortly after 12 p.m. local time. Two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the particle collider, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

CERN is Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire - OR - European Organization for Nuclear Research.

At 17 miles in circumference, the LHC can overcome the electro-weak force, and smash protons into protons.

"The machines and facilities underwent major upgrades during the second long shutdown of CERN's accelerator complex," CERN's director for accelerators and technology, Mike Lamont, said in a statement. "The LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation program and will now operate at an even higher energy and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, it will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments."

Turning on the world's most powerful particle accelerator isn't like throwing a light switch. The magnets have to be cooled to become superconductors, and the protons need to be accelerated. Changes in geometry from the cooling can cause problems, and it takes a while to accelerate something to better than 99% the speed of light.

After about 20 minutes -- and 13.5 million trips around the LHC -- the two streams are brought together in an enormous collision at one of four detector sites along the LHC: Atlas, Alice, CMS and LHCb.

These protons are so small that most of them fly right past each other -- there are only 20 collisions each time two bunches of 100 billion protons are brought together. But there are so many in the beam, that's still 600 million collisions per second.

There is more. Click thru.

There are a lot of stories on the restart of the LHC, but most of them assume you don't even know high school physics. This article isn't much better, but it is a little better.

When the protons smash together, it creates a shower of energetic particles that shoot off in all directions. Detectors measure the energies, directions and velocities of these particles, and the resulting data is fed to a supercomputer for analysis.

Click thru for the rest. The image above is a graphical representation of the data collected form a proton-proton collision in 2016 in the Atlas detector of the Large Hadron Collider. Click to enlarge.

Why do I care about particle physics? I had some involvement with The Tevatron way back in my college days. That was during the time I was planning to major in Physics. Why I didn't is a long story. The Tevatron, which used to be at Fermi National Lab, in Batavia, Illinois, smashed protons and anti-protons together. Matter and Anti-matter. It was quite a system in its day.

This post is in place of an Infrastructure post. Something I haven't had in sometime, though I am hoping to get back to that, because there are still issues.