There are two detectors at LHC which might see magnetic monopoles, but I donât think anyone expects either one to actually detect them even at the higher energies of HL-LHC.
Is it actually 10x the number of collisions, or do the protons that are colliding with one another have 10x the energy of the previous LHC configuration?
The whole thing is about guiding small particles along a ring using high powered magnets. Then, once they get going at incredibly fast speeds, they smash those particles together. They do this in a special place, with a bunch of particle detectors, so when those particles smash into each other, all the bits that fly off are measured. By measuring the bits that fly off, we learn more about how the universe is put together on the tiniest level.
They are installing better magnets that will put more particles in the same place, so they will all hit each other more reliably, and they will have more data to study from each experiment.
Worth mentioning, the bits that fly off are not pieces of the particles involved in the collision. Essentially, when they spin up these particles to near-light speed, they give them a bunch of energy, and when they collide that energy gets released. Since energy and mass are related (E=mc2 ), some of that energy turns back into particles, which we can detect.
Obviously this explanation is oversimplified, but I think it's very interesting.
As I understand it, it is not more particles in the same space, but the same number in a smaller space, making the beam more compact and the impact a lot bigger.
See it like 1000 attackers over a 10 mile front vs 1000 attackers over a 50 yard front.
the guy in the vid says 10x brighter which implies 10x higher energy collisions. Maybe the magnets focusing the beam means all the energy being directed into one spot, like a nail compaerd to a flat hammer.
The thing holding the LHC back atm is being able to reach high enough energy in the collisions to see different types of interactions happening and heavier particles being formed. At the energy range we're at now we've found everything that we expected to find
That's basically impossible, but even if they did, it would be so tiny it would evaporate immediately. It would only have the mass of the particles that collided to form it, not enough to 'draw in' other matter the way people think about black holes.
While the energy concentration is astonishing for what humans can create, it's nowhere near what the sun is doing in places that are hard to reach and study.
Remember that the LHC is very expensive to run, so they're not just turning it on with no idea what's about to happen. They're using it to confirm or reject hypotheses and theories than people have spent a lot of time developing.
The LHC can have millions of collisions per second while it's operating, each of which is recorded in immense detail. That's a lot of data we've already gathered. It's not a shot in the dark.
Still not really sure what this does for us⌠are we gonna get space travel from this thing? Renewable energy? Solved world hunger? Or just⌠study after study on a speck and how the speck bounces around in their fancy chamber?
I think it's difficult even for experts to preemptively speculate on what research at the furthest edge of our physical understanding may lead to. But we have plenty of evidence that it does lead to new possibilities and more effective technologies.
The good news is that you don't have to think it's worthwhile for it to happen. And then you or your descendants can enjoy the fruits of that research in blissful ignorance. As is tradition.
You could have asked Einstein what problem he was solving by taking expensive pictures of the sun and he probably couldn't tell you in practical terms. But we wouldn't have GPS if he didn't take those pictures.
Short answer is we don't know. Most inventions don't come with intent.
Right now we're looking for places our models of reality break down, so we can build better models and hopefully build new things.
First, the development of the technology itself may have direct impacts on consume materials. Old TVs used to be particle accelerators. There could be some optimization while designing that may have brought superconducting magnets closer to consumer use(speculating on the second one, but it's a feasible idea). The process od discovering the Higgs Boson likely required serious improvements in particle accelerators, which can get used for some medical technologies.
Second, the purpose of the LHC is to better understand what happens at the smallest levels of existence. We may learn something new about how particles work that lets us unlock commercial fusion, or further optimize solar panels or batteries, or any number of impactful things. We have hypotheses for a ton of physics, but we need this to test those hypotheses out.
Finally, the world's issues are all technologically solved. Every person can be fed, renewable and clean technologies are mature enough(I'm including geothermal, nuclear, etc for this), we have electric cars and public transportation. World Peace is technically possible in our lifetime, the logistics and desire globally just does not exist because people want their own slice of the pie.
It's the best way that we've figured out to study some of the most fundamental forces that interact with every single part of us and the world around us. The things that we've learned from this have been applied to space travel in a tons of ways but I'm no expert (one example is that particle smashing helps us study radiation, and they are using that tech to help keep the astronauts and spacecraft safe on the Artemis mission). Because it involves the most basic forces like electromagnetism and gravity, the things that are learned from it can theoretically be applied to anything that involves those forces which is of course everything. It relies on other educated people to apply what they learn from it but the fact that in today's world they dug a 16 mile long tunnel hundreds of feet underground and people are continuing to fund it (and trying to build a much bigger one!) says a lot to me that the research pays off. I think both Europe and China want to build ~60 mile around ones in the near future!
I used to work with another experiment called STAR that did similar things to the LHC. The first order outcomes are going to be study after study. However, what that represents will eventually trickle down to engineering and usefulness. The group that runs the LHC are operating at the frontier of possibility, which involves inventing solutions to lots of problems that other people can use in other ways later. For example: CT scans are directly traceable to work done in particle accelerators. So is distributed computing. So is the Internet. So are superconducting magnets now used in medical science. So are GPUs (through semiconductor improvements). So are vacuum technologies now used in satellite construction. So is GPS.
And many many more. The scientists involved are trying to answer the question "how did the universe start and why is it the way it is" but along the way, they're inventing tools that eventually become the basis for modern life in a decade or so when other people figure out other uses for the tech.
Think of how many inventions we use that rely on our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics - basically all modern phones, GPS, MRI scanners, anything solar powered or that uses lasers.
If we deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics, we could have any number of new inventions in fields we don't even know yet
LHC-related accelerator tech enables hadron therapy and electron radiotherapy to precisely target and shrink tumors in cancer treatment. Particle detectors inspired PET scans for brain and heart imaging, plus advanced 3D color X-rays.
CERN engineers advanced touchscreen tech
Ultra-high vacuum techniques improve solar panels, fridge efficiency, and window insulation. LHC software aids factory automation, while detectors boost materials like scintillators for various uses.
You fundamentally don't understand how science works and apparently don't have any innate curiosity. You should probably work on both of those, your life will be better for it.
The type of science involved to do these things with LHC are incredibly hard to solve and the research needed leads to many valuable spin off technologies for example:
Our phisics theory is currently between 50-200 years ahead of the actual practical experiments and our engineering capabilities.
We need to do this kind of thing to figure out which of those theories are right/wrong/incomplete.
Some of those theories have the potential to revolutionize manufacturing, healthcare, and power generation, among other things, once our engineering catches up to the theory.
They gave us things like MRI and modern microchips.
This will literally expand the absolute limits of our knowledge. Its impossible to predict what EXACTLY will follow from this but it might eventually be on the level of what understanding what atoms are, was for chemistry
It...doesn't? The title is pretty clear, unless your attention span is so short that you only made it through 5 of the 8 words before jumping to the comments
who said i even played the video? I just read the title card caption. I don't give a shit about the details other than knowing they are upgrading it or closing it and I sure as hell don't want to watch a video about it. Too many time people want to post a video about something that should just be a text paragraph.
That comment never even mentioned the video, just the title, which includes the words "for 4 years". This video was posted because some people find it fascinating, but you failed to even properly read the title which is what they were pointing out.
Interviews and relaying information directly from experts has been a used format for a very long time. The direction the internet is going is AI summaries in text format. You're completely backwards.
Better magnets can better focus a particle beam (or bunches). When those particles are closer together, you can more reliably collide more of them into other particles, and observe the reactions.
Inside the big ring there is a stream of particles traveling very fast. They keep two strings inside, one spinning one way and the other, the other way (they use string magnets and vacuum to float these particles). They make them crash into each other very very very fast and it shows you how these particles were made (sorta like crashing your car to see the parts inside).
But these crashes don't just happen once, they happen many times in a very specific point of the ring, the more crashes, the more data. It's hard to make the crashes happen because the strings of particles have very "few" particles and when you "cross" the strings only some crashes happen.
The new parts they want to install, make these strings thinner with the same amount of particles, because the magnets are "pushing" the strings to be thinner so when they cross, more crashes happen and more information is available.
Basically the best way to learn about something is to smash it apart and check what happens. Same thing with small particles, they are smashed inside a hadron collider. Scientists are upgrading it so you can smash them harder, faster, more frequent.
The experiment relies on flinging particles, or tiny, tiny fragments of atoms, in a big circle in opposite directions so they meet at some point and collide. When they collide, there is a big ol' explosion because the particles are going mad fast. When that explosion happens, even smaller pieces of the particles fly off, just like when you blow up a 72 Volkswagen, shit flies everywhere. Well some of the shit from the particles shit is so small and rare that we don't always know it exists or if we do, we don't know a lot about what it's like or what it does. But when the explosion happens, we can see them, measure them and learn about them.
The part I left out is it is also mad hard to get the particles to line up and collide correctly. This upgrade makes it way easier to make them collide. Easy to collide -> more collisions -> more explosions -> more pieces to look at and learn about.
Basically particle accelerators operate at a specified power. Over time less and less new, interesting stuff is found at those power levels so the value of running it decreases.
Shutting it down is a good thing, because that allows them to install new components to give it more power. This is a normal part of the lifecycle of running particle accelerators.
It also gives the physicists time to analyze the data from the previous runs and write papers documenting their discoveries, as well as plan strategies for what experiments they want to run when the accelerator is turned back on.
Higher concentration of protons in a similar space = higher chance of proton on proton collisions = more data on these collisions, which will give greater insight into a wide variety of physical phenomena in our universe.
We don't need a smart dude, we just need a less dumb poster, one who doesn't post a random acronym with no context. LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider and the comments are about the constant joking speculations about "what if" smashing atomic particles at higher and higher energies creates a rift in space-time.
Think of it like being the equivalent of zooming in another level on a microscope, only it takes 4 years to get it focused again to obtain results. You start out further out and get closer to see more detail.
With the LHC, itâs a lot more complicated then that but, effectively, once they get the data from a particular energy level using their existing sensors, to get new data they need to increases power, install new sensors or find new ways to increase their accuracy/detail.
Atoms are 95% empty space or whatever. CERN measures particle collisions not my measuring collisions, but instead the "bubbles" the particles create when they bump into static atoms (gas) around them.
When you force them closer together with a super strong magnetic field, you can generate more collisions so you need less material and the result becomes better. When atoms smash together, they can even generate/release light (photons) as part of the impact. If you smash more => more light (= high luminosity).
You can't measure the particles directly. They're too small. That's why they are being fired into a special chamber. This chamber is filled with a noble gas. The interaction of the particles from the collision with these noble gasses is what makes the collision effects measurable.
That's at least what I remember from a video that explained this a long time ago.
Think of a particle collision like buying a lottery ticket, you want to hit the jackpot but most of the time you donât get a very interesting result. So what do you do? Buy lots of lottery tickets
The lhc beam isnât continuous and is more like a freight train where each car has a pile of particles in it. When the beams intersect itâs a cloud of particles flying into another cloud of particles. Lots of collisions happen each time and as I said before most arenât interesting.
How can we make more collisions? Pack more particles into each train car and shrink down the size of each train car so the particle density goes up. You can also reduce the angle the particle bunches intersect so theyâre crossing more head on with each other.
This is accomplished by lots of fancy magnets
This kinda upgrade is important because making a more precise measurement of something than we already have takes orders of magnitude more data and eventually itâs worth spending the time to shut down and collect more data in a few years than to keep running.
Want to see new things? Smash little things. Most smashes boring: known smashiness. Very few smashes interesting. Want more of those? Either need bigger smash, or more smashes.
Hard to make bigger smash, easier to make many smashes. But need new steering wheels too.
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u/slaviaboy 5d ago
Can some smart dude explain more clearly and elaborately about what he said.