Amazingly nobody from the group has posted anything about the LHC startup. I'd hoped (and in fact promised Yoshi) to blog from the CMS control room yesterday but in all the excitement didn't manage it.
For those few who have no idea what I'm talking about yesterday the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was finally switched on after decades of planning and construction. Our group works on the CMS experiment, one of the two larger experiments at the LHC.
So what happened yesterday? Well the LHC is a 27 km long circular accelerator buried under the Swiss and French countryside near Geneva. Yesterday for the first time beams of protons were circulated all the way around the ring. The media coverage of the event was astonishing. Radio 4 covered it live (pleasing my mother very much) and journalists from all over the world were here at CERN all day. I think the best account from the perspective of our experiment can be found here. Plenty of nice pictures of events and a video. Perhaps a little technical in places, but I'd be happy to answer any questions on it. Hats off to Lyn Evans and company, if anything they made it look a little too easy!
So what does it mean? From a scientific perspective it's the start of a journey to exciting discoveries we hope. In the next weeks and months we'll be working hard to calibrate some of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever built. From a personal point of view all the publicity will make it much easier to explain what I do for a living to people in the pub.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, Research Associates and Staff at the Imperial College London High Energy Physics Group. (everyone is invited to add comments!)
Recent Comments
Subscribe to this Blog
Subscribe via Email
Subscribe to Feeds
Contributors
Postings to this blog by HEP group members are being made as individuals and are not intended to be representative of the group as a whole, experimental collaborations, or any other entity.
2 comments:
"Theo Walcott, 19," "a player with the potential to change English football, accelerating it towards the future like so many protons in a Large Hadron Collider", said The Times in its match report on England's fabulous 4 - 1 win away at Croatia on the evening of LHC start-up day....
Here in my office, working on the T2K experiment, I just got alerted by a news report on Radio 5, that collisions at the LHC would be delayed because of a magnet quench. What next? "Breaking news: Dr Alex Tapper spilt his coffee in the control room"?
Seriously, it is fantastic an endeavour such as the LHC is getting the attention in the general media that it deserves. I can't wait to see the response when we actually get collisions at energies beyond the frontiers currently being explored at the Tevatron!
Another sign of the interest in what is happening at CERN right now is that we have had hundreds more people visiting our blog than usual... though the fact that "black hole tonight" is slightly outnumbering "experimental big bang" at the top of the list of search engine terms used to get here does tell us something rather sad. I think that most people now realise that the whole global catastrophe scenario is not a true concern, and that there actually is something really exciting that could come out of this experiment that is a little bit more interesting than your average Hollywood movie.
I was at a friends' wedding last week, and the topic of the LHC did crop up a lot over wine, chouchen and crepes, and seeing today's Telegraph, I think many of the questions I got are addressed by the article "Large Hadron Collider: could it defrost a pizza?".
Thanks very much Alex for that report by the way -- as other milestones are achieved on the way to physics results and discoveries, it'd be great to hear how it is for our Imperial friends who are involved in the LHC.
Especially the CMS Global Calorimeter Trigger....
Post a Comment