Tag Archives: basic research

New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

Can a seventeen-mile-long collider unlock the universe?

A proton is a hadron composed of two up quarks and one down; a neutron consists of two downs and one up.) Fermions also include neutrinos, which, somewhat unnervingly, stream through our bodies at the rate of trillions per second.
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The L.H.C., Doser explained, relies on much the same design, and, in fact, makes use of the tunnel originally dug for LEP. Instead of electrons and positrons, however, the L.H.C. will send two beams of protons circling in opposite directions. Protons are a good deal more massive than electrons—roughly eighteen hundred times more—which means they can carry more energy. For this reason, they are also much harder to manage.

“Basically, what you must have to accelerate any charged particles is a very strong electric field,” Doser said. “And the longer you apply it the more energy you can give them. In principle, what you’d want is an infinitely long linear structure, in which particles just keep getting pushed faster and faster. Now, because you can’t build an infinitely long accelerator, you build a circular accelerator.” Every time a proton makes a circuit around the L.H.C. tunnel, it will receive electromagnetic nudges to make it go faster until, eventually, it is travelling at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. “It gets to a hair below the speed of light very rapidly, and the rest of the time is just trying to sliver down this hair.” At this pace, a proton completes eleven thousand two hundred and forty-five circuits in a single second.

CERN Pressure Test Failure

photo of Femilab inner triplet quadrupole at CERN

On March 27th a high-pressure test at CERN of a Fermilab-built ‘inner-triplet’ series of three quadrupole magnets in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider failed. Fermilab Director on the test failure:

We test the complex features we design thoroughly. In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets. Furthermore even though every magnet was thoroughly tested individually, they were never tested with the exact configuration that they would have when installed at CERN–thus missing the opportunity to discover the problem sooner.

We need and want to make sure that we find the root causes of the problem and from the lessons learned build a stronger institution. Beyond that, there is no substitute for the commitment each of us makes to excellence, to critical thinking and to sweating every detail.

In a Fermilab Update on Inner Triplet Magnets at LHC they state: “The goal at CERN and Fermilab is now to redesign and repair the inner triplet magnets and, if necessary, the DFBX without affecting the LHC start-up schedule. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have identified potential repairs that could be carried out expeditiously without removing undamaged triplet magnets from the tunnel.”

China and USA Basic Science Research

US$425 million to boost Chinese innovation by Fu Jing:

The National Natural Science Foundation of China will provide 3.4 billion yuan (US$425 million) in funding for basic science, it announced last week (25 May).

“The boost has shown the government’s determination for China to become an innovative country by 2020,” said the foundation’s vice-president Zhu Zuoyan. He added that the foundation’s research funding is set to grow by about 20 per cent a year for the next five years.
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According to government plans, China’s total investment in science and technology should reach 2.5 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2020 — a share similar to that spent by industrialised nations.
By that time, China aims to be spending about US$112 billion annually on research and development (see China announces 58-point plan to boost science).

U.S. National Science Foundation Celebrates Opening of Beijing Office

The National Science Foundation is a U.S. government agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of $5.58 billion.
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According to the NSF report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, China ranked fourth in the world in the year 2000 in research and development, with $48.9 billion in expenditures. Two years later, the country ranked third, behind the United States and Japan, spending an estimated $72.0 billion on R&D.

“It is important for the U.S. scientific community, especially young researchers, to be aware of and consider collaborating with colleagues in China in this environment,” said Beijing office Director William Chang.

The NSF Beijing Office is NSF’s third foreign office. NSF also maintains research offices in Paris and Tokyo.