Has any one heard any news on the Large Hadron Collider? I was talking about it with a friend today and it got me wondering when they’ll start looking for the Higgs boson.
Higgs’ bo’s’ns have been known since 2 April 1835, when they assisted in taking a whale.
I’d heard they’d finally gotten it fixed, and the spare juice needed, to start twin beams of protons going. I just learned in that report that they can program in magnetic deviations that will cause the beams to collide years from now, and that was what they’d done. I didn’t know they spun the beams up, up, up up up, and up, for years, before collision. Check their web page for news bites, tho it doesn’t seem to have bee updated lately:
And yes, that’s the real web page, and not the animated gif showing the parking lot dissolve into a black hole and swallow cars humorously.
They were doing some test runs in nov/dec and had beams going and got a bunch of collisions. Not sure if any interesting new data came out of that part of it though, think that bit was just for checking that everything was working ok at (relatively) lower energies.
According to this press release - “The LHC has now been put into standby mode, and will restart in February 2010 following a short technical stop to prepare for higher energy collisions and the start of the main research programme.”
So things should really get rolling fairly soon.
Might be a good idea to check out CERN on twitter for live information when they get going. Should be able to get some real-time information there about what’s going on when things start up again.
Sign in to CERN is an excellent site for checking the progress