Related press releases
Related research
Scientists Believe that Particle Smasher 'not a Threat to the Earth'
:: 29 March, 2008
Campaigners in the US are attempting to delay the start-up of the world's most powerful particle smasher with a lawsuit claiming it could spawn dangerous particles or mini black holes that will destroy the entire Earth.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is nearing completion at CERN, the European centre for particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists hope it will begin operations in mid-July.
On 21 March, Hawaii residents Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's US District Court against CERN and US contributors to the project demanding that they do not operate the LHC until they prove it is safe. The US contributors named are the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Science Foundation and Fermilab, an accelerator laboratory near Chicago.
The DoE and Fermilab will not comment on the case, insisting it is a legal matter to be dealt with by the Department of Justice.
The lawsuit's claims are "complete nonsense", James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, told. "The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe," he said, adding: "A year from now, the world will still be here."
Killer strangelets
The collider will simulate conditions less than a billionth of a second after the big bang, by smashing protons together at enormous energies. Physicists hope to resolve long-standing questions, such as why particles have mass and whether space has hidden extra dimensions.
But Wagner and Sancho's court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as "killer strangelets". Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter containing "strange" quarks, as well as the usual "up" and "down" types that make up ordinary matter.
If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating the nuclei of ordinary matter, converting them into strange matter. Eventually the menacing chain reaction could assimilate our entire planet and everyone on it.
A 2003 safety review for the LHC found "no basis for any conceivable threat". It acknowledged that there's a small chance the accelerator could create short-lived, mini black holes or exotic "magnetic monopoles" that destroy protons in ordinary atoms. But it concluded that neither scenario could lead to disaster.
That report and lay summaries of its findings are available on CERN's website. An updated version of the safety assessment will soon be released, and physicists plan to discuss safety during a CERN open house on 6 April.
'Dangerous matter'
Wagner raised similar concerns to those in the new court papers during development of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York State. "RHIC started running in 2000 and we're still here," says Gillies.
Besides, he adds, much higher energy collisions that those at the LHC frequently occur in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip around our galaxy at close to the speed of light. The moon has undergone such collisions for 5 billion years without being devoured by a ravenous black hole or killer strangelet, he adds.
However, Wagner and Sancho describe CERN's safety reviews as "perfunctory" and say the cosmic ray argument may be misleading.
"There is no question that should [the] defendants inadvertently create a dangerous form of matter such as a micro black hole or a strangelet, or otherwise create unsafe conditions of physics, then the environmental impact would be both local and national in scope, and quite deadly to everyone," their lawsuit claims. A website appeals for funds to support their case.
Unconfirmed reports say that a magistrate judge has been assigned to the case for an initial conference on 16 June, and that Wagner intends to serve court papers to the federal government.
"What we want to do is get this machine up and running," Gillies says. "We'll show people that the world is not going to disappear."
Note for Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and hadron collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N, 6°03′E). It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to its final operating temperature of ~4 K (−269 °C). The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will 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 as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics and could 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 all of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravitation. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.
The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.
The 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although the majority of its length is inside France. The collider itself is located underground, with many surface buildings holding ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.
The collider tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, each pipe containing a proton beam. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Additional magnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between them will take place. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.
The LHC physics program is mainly based on proton-proton collisions. However, shorter running periods, typically one month per year, with heavy-ion collisions are included in the programme. While lighter ions are considered as well, the baseline scheme deals with lead (Pb) ions. This will allow an advancement in the experimental programme currently in progress at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
The construction of LHC was originally approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs, with another 210 million francs (140 M€) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (300 M€) in the accelerator, and 50 million francs (30 M€) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget pushed the completion date out from 2005 to April 2007. 180 million francs (120 M€) of the cost increase has been the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between $5 and $10 billion.
Note for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is a heavy-ion collider located at and operated by Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York. By using RHIC to collide ions traveling at relativistic speeds, physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and also the structure of protons.
At present, RHIC is the most powerful heavy-ion collider in the world. It is also distinctive in its capability to collide spin-polarized protons.
RHIC is an intersecting storage ring (ISR) particle accelerator. Two independent rings (arbitrarily denoted as "blue" and "yellow" rings, see also the photograph) allow a virtually free choice of colliding projectiles. The RHIC double storage ring is itself hexagonally shaped and 3834 m long in circumference, with curved edges in which stored particles are deflected by 1,740 superconducting niobium titanium magnets. The six interaction points are at the middle of the six relatively straight sections, where the two rings cross, allowing the particles to collide. The interaction points are enumerated by clock positions, with the injection point at 6 o'clock.
A particle passes through several stages of boosters before it reaches the RHIC storage ring. The first stage for ions is the Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator, while for protons, the 200 MeV linear accelerator (Linac) is used. As an example, gold nuclei leaving the Tandem Van de Graaff have an energy of about 1 MeV per nucleon and have an electric charge Q = +32 (32 electrons stripped from the gold atom). The particles are then accelerated by the Booster Synchrotron to 95 MeV per nucleon, which injects the projectile now with Q = +77 into the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS), before they finally reach 8.86 GeV per nucleon and are injected in a Q = +79 state (no electrons left) into the RHIC storage ring over the AGS-To-RHIC Transfer Line (ATR), sitting at the 6 o'clock position.
The main types of particle combinations used at RHIC are p + p, d + Au, Cu + Cu and Au + Au. The projectiles typically travel at a speed of 99.995% of the speed of light in vacuum. For Au + Au collision, the center-of-mass energy is typically 200 GeV (or 100 GeV per nucleon); a luminosity of 2 × 1026 cm-2 s-1 was targeted during the planning. The current luminosity performance of the collider is 2.96 × 1026 cm-2 s-1 (Run-4/PHENIX). A center-of-mass energy of 400 GeV was briefly achieved during Run-5, colliding protons.
One unique characteristic of RHIC is its capability to produce polarized protons. RHIC holds the record of highest energy polarized protons. Polarized protons are injected into RHIC and preserving this state throughout the energy ramp is difficult task that can only be accomplished with the aid of Siberian Snakes (a chain of solenoids and quadrupoles for aligning particles) and AC dipoles. The AC dipoles have been also used in non-linear machine diagnostics for the first time in RHIC.
About European Organization for Nuclear Research
The European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.
The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.
CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.
As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates. This includes the organization's fleet of fire trucks.
The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is".
Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.
Tags: Large Hadron Collider , CERN , Hawaii residents Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner filed , Department of Energy (DoE) , the National Science Foundation and Fermilab , an accelerator laboratory near Chicago , big bang , Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)at Brookhaven National Laboratory , New York State ,
