Full circulation of beams in the LHC successfully completed

Great news!

See here and here for the progress over the last hour or so.

LHC startup - links only

I'm afraid that things are simply too busy for me to justify a full writeup, the length of which the LHC deserves, so I shall just jot down some thoughts for now and link to the best places to get information on tomorrow's start-up.


Tomorrow is not that day of first collisions, that will come presumably in a few weeks time. Tomorrow is the first day of full circulation of protons within the beam pipe. This is a technological milestone, and a hugely important day for the progress of the machine, but not a special day for scientific discoveries.

The LHC is the largest, most complex machine ever built to discover what happens on the smallest, most basic level of nature - somehow this seems rather perverse, but that's the way the world works, and this is how we've learnt to probe the forces that govern the universe, and the matter which lies within it. The LHC is a feat of engineering, technological and political marvels, and the fact that it is already many, many years behind its original startup date does not detract from the fact that it is an incredible human achievement...and tomorrow we discover whether or not they correctly connected the starter motor. In fact tomorrow they will be discovering many new things about this machine which cannot be known until protons are running through it.

Having spent some time myself at Babar, a particle accelerator at SLAC, in Stanford, and spent many many hours in the control room, watching over the histograms, and seeing the engineers lose the beam over and over again (this isn't a criticism, it's a comment on how difficult the job is, even for a well-established machine), I won't be too surprised/dissapointed if tomorrow things do not go off to a perfectly smooth start straight away. If it takes hours/days or even weeks to correctly get the proton beams circulating, it wouldn't be that incredible, but I look forward to seeing what happens tomorrow nonetheless.

Anyway, tomorrow I will be keeping up with the progress in the morning through various sources. You can find many good links from:

A quantum diaries survivor
Cosmic Variance, who will be live-blogging the events
The US LHC blog

Of course, the CERN/LHC webpage
Including the live webcast
Twitter on CERN, or indeed CERN on Twitter - I've never looked at Twitter, being already deluged with too much information, but it seems that for up to the minute events, this is probably useful.
Also check out the TED website for some more information.

OK, that'll do for now. Enjoy!

Why we're so damned excited about the LHC

If you want a sense of the wonder which, as a scientist, I feel for the experiment shortly to be switched on at CERN, in Geneva, I would highly recommend watching this TED talk by Brian Cox. Towards the end Brian gives a powerful sentiment of the incredible fact that all of what we see around us, all the objects, the ideas, the emotions, our history and our future came from the simple combination of hydrogen atoms and the laws of physics.

Encompassed in this passage is my own sense of amazement at the fact that from humble beginnings, the universe is now self-aware. The emergent complexity from basic structures and rules is what makes me passionate about trying to understand more.

In addition to the above talk is the following animation which gives a sense of the technological achievements which have already taken place at CERN. As the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait says

I stood right there, looked right into the heart of that beast, and even now watching that animation gives me chills.

Count me in on that! It also gives me satisfaction that I played a small part in the progress of ATLAS.


Thanks to BABlog and Asymptotia.

Strings in CERN

I'm currently in CERN, in Geneva at the RTN winter school on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Theories which is proving to be both extremely interesting and exhausting in equal measure. With five hours of lectures a day and several hours spent every evening working with my collaborator, it feels like we've had weeks here already although the whole thing will be over on Friday. Though I hadn't been particularly looking forward to the topics, the lecturers are all excellent and I'm learning more from these courses than I have from a school in some time. Many of the lecture notes are up online and the videos I presume will follow.

Today we were lucky enough to take a trip to one of the two main detectors for the LHC, the 27km circumference proton accelerator to be turned on later this year. The CMS detector had its final segment lowered 100m into the ground yesterday and so the bulk of the machine is now in place, getting ready to start taking data from the particle collisions some time in the summer (data is already being taken in the detectors from cosmic ray events). At 12,500 tonnes, and around 21 by 16 meters, this is in essence a huge piece of electronics which will be a general purpose detector (one of the two, the other being ATLAS) monitoring some of the 40 million collisions per second when the machine is running at full pelt.

I'll get my own photos up online when I'm back in Santiago. Having spent some time working on Babar it was impressive to see the next generation of machine which we hope to give us some of the missing pieces which we know must be out there to complete our understanding of of elementary particle physics.

In the time outside lectures I'm working as quickly as possible with my collaborator on a project which has taken far too long and we are finally trying to get it finished off. Having spent almost all of the time working on this project in different continents we're taking full advantage of our current state. Will update more when I'm back home.