Related press releases
Related research
Supercooling System Sealed at Large Hadron Collider Particle Accellerator
:: 09 November, 2007
Mark off another key milestone in the construction of Europe's massive Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. In an underground ceremony today, CERN officials sealed the last interconnection point in LHC's cryogenic system that will ultimately cool more than 1700 magnets to a temperature just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero.
We just have to wait a little while longer for that to happen.
Originally slated to begin operations in late 2007, the project has slipped to mid-2008, with launch estimates now ranging from early to late summer, depending on if all goes well as the magnets are cooled in stages, and beams of protons injected into the massive machine.
The cryogenic system completed today will carry about 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen and 130 tons of liquid helium around the ring, cooling the magnets to their point of energy-saving superconductivity. That will in turn allow them to create powerful magnetic fields that will bend the protons around the particle accelerator's 16.7 mile ring, before smashing into each other at close to the speed of light.
"This is a huge accomplishment," said Lyn Evans, LHC project leader. "Now that it is done, we can concentrate on getting the machine cold and ready for physics."
Note for Cryogenics
In physics or engineering, cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperatures (below –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K) and the behavior of materials at those temperatures. (Rather than the familiar temperature scales of Fahrenheit and Celsius, cryogenicists use the Kelvin and Rankine scales.)
Note for Particle accelerator
A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically-charged particles to high speeds and to contain them. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: linear (i.e. straight-line) accelerators and circular (i.e. circles) accelerators.
Beams of high-energy particles are useful for both fundamental and applied research in the sciences. For the most basic inquiries into the dynamics and structure of matter, space, and time, physicists seek the simplest kinds of interactions at the highest possible energies. These typically entail particle energies of many GeV or more, and the interactions of the simplest kinds of particles: leptons (e.g., electrons and positrons) and quarks for the matter, or photons and gluons for the field quanta. Since isolated quarks are experimentally unavailable due to color confinement, the simplest available experiments involve the interactions of, first, leptons with each other, and second, of leptons with nucleons, which are composed of quarks and gluons. To study the collisions of quarks with each other, we resort to collisions of nucleons, which at high energy may be usefully considered as essentially 2-body interactions of the quarks and gluons of which they are composed. Thus elementary particle physicists tend to use machines creating beams of electrons, positrons, protons, and anti-protons, interacting with each other or with the simplest nuclei (eg, hydrogen or deuterium) at the highest possible energies, generally hundreds of GeV or more.
Note for Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N, 6°03′E). Currently under construction, the LHC is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008. The LHC is expected to become the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories.
When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson — often dubbed the God Particle — the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why the remaining force, gravitation, is so weak compared to the other three forces.
Tags: Europe , Large Hadron Collider , particle accelerator , CERN , cryogenic system , magnet , protons , energy-saving , superconductivity , nitrogen , helium , Lyn Evans. ,
