LHC portal

In which sector is the short circuit?

It's 3-4

Sector 4-5 sux. Anyone know why?

And the call went out to the particle physicists of the world: TO THE BALLOONS!!

There's a great series of papers by Franklin Felber which predicts a repulsive gravity effect measurable in the beam tunnel, but not in a way which interferes with the normal operation of the LHC. http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1084 The consequences of verifying this prediction, which is based on GR, can...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26250716 Wearing my CERN director imaginary hat, here's how I'd attack son of LHC: 1. Decide what it is: electrons, protons + heavy ions, or both. Might be able to do 2 beampipes in one tunnel, or could time multiplex (electrons on Tuesdays) 2. Decide wh...

Yeah, OK, I guess that's the way it is. The Statistics plot looks reasonably straight line slope, so I guess we'll make or exceed target. Just today there have been about three failures. All credit to the crews though; they seem to jump on them immediately to work and fix the problems. Thanks for th...

I can see 70% by eye from "LHC Operation" over one day. You say over 90% is hilarious, but if I look at the minimum downtime between runs, it is a fact that 90%, more or less, is achievable. Why do we differ, then? The longest runs we see are around 12 hours, with a typical intensity drop over the d...

I pop in from time to time to see how it's all going, and of late have been a little disappointed with machine utilisation. Admittedly, some days have Physics going up to 70% of the time, but many days are like today with Physics being done less than 50% of the time. I think the theoretical limit is...

:text-imnewhere: Have been monitoring the LHC regularly since before switch-on. What an awesome achievement of physics and engineering. It has to be the most complex machine ever built to date. A little about me: an M.A. in physics from the UK and then over 40 years as an engineer (hardware, softwar...

I'm always intrigued that when a good run is underway and all status indicators show green and PHYSICS, the TOTEM status is invariably at STANDBY. Maybe they sleep a lot? maybe there's just one grad student on the project? Who knows?