Sneaky Video Tour of the Large Hadron Collider CMS Experiment!

[Mike Fishcake]

That's absolutely fascinating! Just downloading the 3rd video now. Do they not mind you posting these videos around?

[Fraz]

That's absolutely fascinating! Just downloading the 3rd video now. Do they not mind you posting these videos around?

Let's hope not!

More seriously, it's all good "outreach" for the project. It's not like we've got anything confidential down there or anything.

[Fraz]

For those with 17 minutes spare, here is a 171 MB, 17 minute long mpeg file animation of how the thing was put together, with some fairly soothing Leftfield track in the background.

http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/CMSm...ly%20final.mpg

I love the "DHARMA" style beginning to the video!

You can see towards the end of the video just how much shielding has to fold around the beam pipe to protect the nearby LHC magnets from bits of beam that will spray forwards during beam collisions. This rotating shielding is coloured orange in my videos of the real thing, and wraps around the green pointy bit in the 3rd video. The LHC beam is powerful enough to make a real mess of concrete, so this shielding is several tens of tons of steel.

[AD-15]

hello,

Thanks a lot for uploading these man, they're awesome!!!!!

I intend to be a physicist once I've left uni, and indeed hope to be working where you are now.

[Whiternoise]

Impressive to see it though, bet it is one hell of a sight in person!

It is - the ATLAS is huge, but i've not been to the CMS so i dunno what the comparison is..

And to back up what Fraz said, when we visited, they were happy for us to take pictures and video - nothing that they want to keep secret, since it's basically a public science project. And of course, it's free publicity for them!

[Fraz]

It is - the ATLAS is huge, but i've not been to the CMS so i dunno what the comparison is..

ATLAS is much bigger in volume, although weighs a lot less.

The idea is to have two completely different designs of detector... thus, if we see the same signal in both, we know it's not some weird experimental bias.

The LHC Synchrotron, the CMS detector, the ATLAS detector, and the massive computing project that runs behind the scenes to process all the data - each of these is almost certainly in the top ten most-complicated human endeavors. In fact, the computing is probably more complicated than the other 3 put together...

Honestly, every time I learn about a new facet of this project, I get even more amazed at the level of complexity involved.

[staffsMike]

This really is amazing stuff, thanks for posting the videos. Pretty sure we are well passed the last eta. What's the new one?

[GoNz0]

yeh i have been keeping tabs on this, thanks for the vids

[Fraz]

This really is amazing stuff, thanks for posting the videos. Pretty sure we are well passed the last eta. What's the new one?

As far as I can work out, I reckon it'll be August/September when we have first collisions. But it'll be well into next year before we actually have the machine and experiments running even vaguely smoothly.

[Whiternoise]

As my physics teacher aptly put it, "if students can't get used to series circuits, what the hell would they do with the schematic for CERN", the mind boggles thinking about where all those wires go..

[Marcos]

I just watched a cool documentary on this LHC, although it was more about the WHY its being done and the history, rather than how it works.

Great stuff though


Its called "The Six Billion Dollar Experiment"

[DevilMayCry42]

This is brilliant stuff, I love it! I'm hoping to get a job like that following uni
BTW, what did you do you're degree in? Just physics, or was it more focused?

[TAKTAK]

lol @ 1:10 in vid 3 @ the non-chalant whistle...

You sir, are a God

[Fraz]

This is brilliant stuff, I love it! I'm hoping to get a job like that following uni
BTW, what did you do you're degree in? Just physics, or was it more focused?

I did a 4 year Physics with Astrophysics MSci, and then a PhD in Particle Physics.