SubscribeWhen the accelerator is fired up, two parallel beams of particles will be blasted around the underground ring in opposite directions. At four locations on the circuit, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other in a giant chamber rigged with equipment to record the collisions and their aftermath.
Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history.
Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine.
The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva.
When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually.
"If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission.
Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.
When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.BBC Radio 4 will devote a day of programming to the LHC, including covering first injection of beams live on the Today programme. See the BBC website for programming, background etc.
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There's just one snag with all that - it's cobblers. All the good, interesting stuff from the LHC - the Higgs deiton, the dark matter, the possibly planet-gobbling black hole dimensional portal threat and/or universe-buster runaway strangelet or monopole soup plagues, dessert topping apocalypses etc - none of that's on offer today. All of these excellent possibilities require the LHC boffins to actually collide some hadrons - well, duh. The clue's in the name. But they aren't ready for that yet.
What's happening today is the inaugural, gentle bowling of some initial protons around the entire 27-km subterranean ultrachilled superconductor magno-track. That's your lot.
In coming months the underground Alpine boffinry chiefs, once happy that they have hadrons whipping round the big ring properly in one direction, will fire up the opposing stream going the other way.
Only then, once the two unprecedentedly puissant particle cannons are reliably ripping out clips of protons on full auto both clockwise and anticlockwise, will the real fun begin. Only then will the boffins begin to seriously meddle with the very fabric of the universe, as they possibly rashly cross the streams of the two colossal energy guns, ramming protons into one another at almost light speed. Thus far, we are told only that this will happen "by the end of the year".
Even then, it will be some little time more before nervous brainboxes actually turn the control known only* as "The Big Knob" right up, doubtless disregarding despairing warnings from their hunchbacked assistants with a cackle of insane laughter as they do so. Only then will the intensity of the LHC's criss-crossing proton or ion beams rise to previously unseen levels as the hurtling particles accelerate past the speeds previously achieved in earlier, lesser atom-smashers like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
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The LHC simulator looks fun. I like the big red SHUTDOWN button...
posted by DU at 3:03 AM on September 9, 2008