Any word on when it’s going to collapse the planet into an ultradense particle about the size of a pea?
First of all, for most practical purposes she is now at “full power” in the sense that they are circulating and colliding an enormous amount of protons. In fact, the experiments have had to essentially tell the LHC to slow down, because the experiments have a hard time when there are too many collisions happening at once. It’s not running at the “design energy”, but that’s OK, and in fact fairly common in this field, where each experiment is like a moon mission that has never been done before. They are still at an energy that is quite a bit higher than the previously highest-energy proton collider (the Tevatron), so they are happy enough. The reason for not just cranking her up to the design energy is because of the thousand+ superconducting magnets (each the size of a bus) that have to be cooled by liquid helium, and steer the beam of protons around the circular collider. The higher the energy of the proton beam, the faster the protons go, and the stronger the magnetic field is required to bend the beam in a circle. These superconducting magnets are at the cutting edge of technology (or at least they were when they were designed), and are very delicate – the tiniest disruption (an energy deposit from a stray particle, the magnet wires shifting under enormous electromagnetic strain) and the superconducting properties of the magnet can be lost. This is a fairly catastrophic event, because it dramatically changes the resistance of the magnet coil, which is carrying thousands of amps of electricity, and all that energy has to go somewhere! The magnets are designed to do this gracefully enough and recover, but each time it happens the proton beam has to be “dumped”, and the whole process of creating and accelerating the proton beam has to start over again. It’s a real waste of time! So essentially they have chosen a beam energy that is pretty high – the magnets are expected to “quench” (the technical term for them going non-superconducting) every once in a while, but not so often as to be a terrible nuisance. Another limiting factor (which caused the big 2008 incident), was basically a poor soldering job – when you have tens of thousands of amps going through interconnects, you had better make sure there aren’t any high-resistance bits. The LHC needs to take a year or two off at some point in order to really get down in there and replace or fix or better evaluate all of those soldering jobs. But for now physicists are eager to just get on with it… since the energy is plenty high enough to find the Higgs (if it exists)!
From the link; “Sutton said the bird and its bread were discovered at a compensating capacitor – one of the points where the mains electricity supply enters the collider from above ground.”
Sure its not a flux capacitor?
Once again the tortoise of reality overtakes the hare of comedy.
One of the leading scientists at the LHC was also arrested for suspected links with al-Qaeda. Two fairly distinguished physicists published a paper arguing, backed with rigorous mathematics, that the Higgs-Boson is travelling back in time from the future to sabotage the LHC in the present and prevent itself from being created. I don’t know if the physicists hammed it up but you still have to rub your eyes when reading the story.
washoe:
Hell, have them turn it up to 11! Surely the LHC goes to 11!
“I’d like to higgs your boson…”
Be glad. It’s a proven fact that 72.3% of all scientific experiments gone awry turn the scientist who has just gotten super-powers evil.
And humanity’s the better for it.
They haven’t published an official statement, but they have published an analysis done with significantly more data than was included in the leaked ‘Easter Higgs’ memo, in which no signal excess is seen at all. (Here’s an article on that analysis.)
As for the OPs question, no, they haven’t found anything yet, which is very interesting. 
For one, they have already plowed through a significant amount of the parameter space where one would expect signs of (certain, common and convenient variants of) supersymmetry to show up, with nothing so far; supersymmetry is essentially something that relates bosons (‘force’ particles) and fermions (‘matter’ particles) to one another, pairing each with a so-called ‘superpartner’. It’s these superpartners that have so far eluded detection. Supersymmetry is very nice to have in certain situations, as it simplifies a couple of otherwise rather vexing problems in particle physics; it’s also a part of superstring theory, though you can do string theory without it, I believe. If we don’t see anything here soon, at least some of the most popular current models might have to be abandoned or significantly revised.
Also, the expectation, going by the current rate of data collection, is that by the end of the year, we’ll probably know whether there is a ‘plain’ Higgs or not, where by ‘plain’ I mean the most common, standard model version of it.
We have also gotten improved bounds on the size of extra dimensions postulated in some models, though I don’t know that anything’s actually been ruled out here.
Some years ago I was talking to a college (a very eminent theoretical (QCD) physicist) about the LHC, and asked him what he though might turn up. His strong opinion was that they would find exactly nothing. “Not even the Higgs?” asked I. To which his rely was that that was a particle with no right to exist. Indeed it is an interesting truth that the most exciting thing that the LHC could find is exactly nothing. Supersymmetric particles would almost be a let down.
I was just thinking that if they found nothing, it sure as hell would be a hard sell to the “public” to get funding for the next even more powerful particle collider/whatever. Now, I understand that finding nothing could be a big and still informative deal and it doesnt imply anything about the usefulness of the next big scientific toy, but the paying public might not.
No, that’s the second-most-exciting thing they could find at best, maybe third or fourth. The most exciting thing they could find is something that nobody ever even anticipated. After that would be a microscopic black hole or magnetic monopoles, though I’m not exactly optimistic about either of those. Nothing would be pretty interesting, but not quite as interesting as any of those, I think.
Are we there yet ?
Can I have an ice cream ?
If theres any more disruption NOBODYS going to get to hear about Dark Energy .
Don’t make me mad !
‘Naked singularity’ might get you some Kurzweil porn, so I’d be careful about that…
Random useless bragging: I was at CERN last week, standing in the visitors’ centre, imagining the LHC whizzing protons around under my feet, and it was a profoundly moving experience, oddly enough. I was geeking out with a vengeance. Amazing place.
..and that got me curious.
My first porn hit was at the top of the second page, but I used the plural “holes.” And it was the only ‘hit’ for five pages.
Huh.
I thought they were getting neat color-coded charts and 3-D models. Try googling “LHC results” and click over to images or videos. Full disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m looking at.
They do end up with pretty pictures of various sorts, but they’re not real-time. All of those pictures require individual human action to produce them, and most of them are the results of data collected over a very long period of time.
In a previous life I used to have fun building neat 3d coloured images. There are some great tools that make it reasonably easy, but they are not trivial, and take some mastering. Things like Open DX, and AVS Express. A college, into lattice gauge QCD, did these very neat animations in AVS. It took him ages. They are the results of simulations that, at the time, took weeks on a million dollar supercomputer. A bit mundane by modern standards, but still pretty good.
What you don’t get are the instant images where the middle aged academic says to the cute post-doc “you know it might just work” and then gets to save the world and shag the postdoc. Pity. Especially the bit about the postdoc.
It does strike me that the world has a skewed idea of the LHC. There is a lot more science going on than just whacking things together to look for the Higgs. LNCb is looking into the matter antimatter asymmetry, Totem is measuring the proton proton interaction. Sadly I guess they all feel the need to sell themselves to keep the interest up.
FTR, I get porn on the third image. That said, why would you call Google providing not-porn “smart”?
What happened to you, Chronos? What are you doing with your life, man?
Oh, I was doing a text search, not images. And I call Google smart because it delivers non-porn when non-porn is sought, while still delivering porn when porn is sought.