Large Hadron Collider: First Blood Part II

[Steve]

I was watching Flashforward last night and they said CERN could do 500TeV.

You holding back on us, Fraz?



I love pseudoscience

[Lee H]

As long as theres no people with the surnames Ripley, Hudson, Burke and Frost you'll be okay

I can't wait to see what advancements all the information gleamed from experiments like this is going to bring.

[Brucelles]

I| just want to say that I am changing my name to Bruce Higgs-Boson.

[Fraz]

I was watching Flashforward last night and they said CERN could do 500TeV.

You holding back on us, Fraz?



I love pseudoscience

I had a mate text me about this yesterday evening. I'm gonna try and catch up on the series tonight and see what it's all about.

LHC can only do 14 TeV with protons, but there is no reason you can't accelerate something else. We'll be doing heavy-ion collisions at some point, which involves accelerating lead nuclei. Since lead nuclei have 82 protons, you end up with something silly like collisions with 1148 TeV energy (i.e. 14 TeV * 82).

[Steve]

I had a mate text me about this yesterday evening. I'm gonna try and catch up on the series tonight and see what it's all about.

LHC can only do 14 TeV with protons, but there is no reason you can't accelerate something else. We'll be doing heavy-ion collisions at some point, which involves accelerating lead nuclei. Since lead nuclei have 82 protons, you end up with something silly like collisions with 1148 TeV energy (i.e. 14 TeV * 82).

You realise you just validated the pseudoscience, thus making it more plausible? If physics doesn't work out for you, become an tech/science expert for TV show scriptwriters.

[Fraz]

As long as theres no people with the surnames Ripley, Hudson, Burke and Frost you'll be okay

Gotta love Aliens... hence my sig

[Whiternoise]

You can make particle accelerators as small as you want. You just need a charged particle like an electron and a couple of oppositely charged plates and hey presto, particle accelerator! CRTs are particle accelerators too.

The smallest particle accelerators are actually plasma based, produced using a laser.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27069

[kalniel]

You can make particle accelerators as small as you want. You just need a charged particle like an electron and a couple of oppositely charged plates and hey presto, particle accelerator! CRTs are particle accelerators too.

The smallest particle accelerators are actually plasma based, produced using a laser.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27069

Putting my biologist hat on I'd say the smallest particle accelerators are somewhat smaller than that metre long plasma thing Take chlorophyll for example

[[GSV]Trig]

I was, and dont ask me why, wondering if you could make one small enough to use as a propulsion unit in a space craft similar to how an ion booster would work, obviusly with the collider things you have you can accelerate particles a lot...

[kalniel]

I was, and dont ask me why, wondering if you could make one small enough to use as a propulsion unit in a space craft similar to how an ion booster would work, obviusly with the collider things you have you can accelerate particles a lot...

Not relative to the mass of the accelerator

[Fraz]

Not relative to the mass of the accelerator

Haha yes. The LHC would make a fairly hopeless space ship I expect. Too late and had slightly too many beers to bother with back of envelope calculations.

[Fraz]

You can make particle accelerators as small as you want. You just need a charged particle like an electron and a couple of oppositely charged plates and hey presto, particle accelerator! CRTs are particle accelerators too.

The smallest particle accelerators are actually plasma based, produced using a laser.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27069

Yup - you can get a laser wakefield accelerator to put on your desk that'd do about 1 GeV these days, which is quite impressive really. I went to a seminar about them just a few days ago.

[Whiternoise]

I was, and dont ask me why, wondering if you could make one small enough to use as a propulsion unit in a space craft similar to how an ion booster would work, obviusly with the collider things you have you can accelerate particles a lot...

An ion thruster is basically a particle accelerator. All space propulsion systems I can think of use Newton's third law (excluding the ridiculously exotic things like wormholes) - equal and opposite reactions - to get off the ground and keep moving. In space as you don't have the luxury of air, you can only rely on chucking things out the back of the ship to give you a bit of a boost. So, in momentum terms this tends to be chucking out mass at as high a velocity as you can. The larger the velocity, the larger your momentum term becomes.

Ion thrusters accelerate charged particles (ions) to huge velocities so that although you're chucking out things that weigh a fraction of a gram, they're being chucked out such a high speed that you can generate a pretty reasonable amount of force.

You kinda answered your own question there

[Zak33]

but there is no reason you can't accelerate something else

would you accept Trig's Cavalier Turbo.. it used to be real fast but he's left it too long now.....

[[GSV]Trig]

How very dare you...

[Fraz]

would you accept Trig's Cavalier Turbo.. it used to be real fast but he's left it too long now.....

If we boiled it down to its component atomic nuclei it'd fit in the beam pipe all right. Prob go a lot faster like that