LHC myths

[PB666]

http://www.technobyte.org/2015/06/large-hadron-collider-lhc-myths/

I particularly like the one about vacuum bubbles.

[wumpus]

The "strange matter" description didn't make much sense at all.  Also, if they are going to claim that not finding x after period y is some sort of answer, how many Higg's bosons were discovered before LHC?  I think the real difficulty is that shear definition of "strange matter" in that it is a soup of specific quarks: Fire up the energy enough and expect to convert a bit of energy into "some matter": why would "some matter" take *that* particular form?  And how would you tell if you had it?

Sill no idea what a "vacuum bubble" is.  Not sure what the difference between creating a "new big bang" and a "vacuum bubble" (with the obvious exception that a big bang fills the vacuum with matter).

On 'creating black holes'.  Don't nutrinos and similar create plenty of black holes already (as in more than the LHC)?

[cantab]

The most common one is about particle colliders in general, when someone says "It's like trying to learn how watches work by smashing two watches together."

To which I respond, what happens in the LHC is like if you smashed two watches together and you got out the pieces to make a kettle and a toaster. The energy in the particle collisions is so great that it drives E=mc² backwards and creates new matter. LHC didn't find a Higgs boson, it made one.

[todofwar]

So many theories of how science will end things fall down on closer inspection. One that annoys me is the idea that nanobots will consume the world because according to one article on the subject, everything at the atomic scale is basically the same so they can convert the world into more nanobots. Pretty sure there is an entire field or science that only exists because things are not the same at the atomic scale.

Back to this topic, I know there isn't cause to be concerned about black holes formed in the LHC, but just how big of a collider would we need to make one that will absorb more energy then it emits? 

[insert_name]

23 minutes ago, todofwar said:

So many theories of how science will end things fall down on closer inspection. One that annoys me is the idea that nanobots will consume the world because according to one article on the subject, everything at the atomic scale is basically the same so they can convert the world into more nanobots. Pretty sure there is an entire field or science that only exists because things are not the same at the atomic scale.

Back to this topic, I know there isn't cause to be concerned about black holes formed in the LHC, but just how big of a collider would we need to make one that will absorb more energy then it emits? 

It's not so much the size of the collider but the mass of the particle, subatomic particles produce subatomic black holes.

[cantab]

"A black hole of 4.5 × 10²² kg (about the mass of the Moon, or about 13 micrometers across) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits." - Wikipedia

What that means is that for a particle collider to create a stable black hole, it would need to be powered by a moon made of antimatter. Or, to put it another way, if you made a Dyson Sphere round the Sun absorbing all its energy output, and you waited for several hundred thousand years, you'd have charged up enough power for that particle collider to make one black hole.

The speed of light squared is a BIG number.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, cantab said:

"A black hole of 4.5 × 10²² kg (about the mass of the Moon, or about 13 micrometers across) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits." - Wikipedia

What that means is that for a particle collider to create a stable black hole, it would need to be powered by a moon made of antimatter. Or, to put it another way, if you made a Dyson Sphere round the Sun absorbing all its energy output, and you waited for several hundred thousand years, you'd have charged up enough power for that particle collider to make one black hole.

The speed of light squared is a BIG number.

Only half a moon of antimatter and another half of regular matter. 

[PB666]

26 minutes ago, cantab said:

The most common one is about particle colliders in general, when someone says "It's like trying to learn how watches work by smashing two watches together."

To which I respond, what happens in the LHC is like if you smashed two watches together and you got out the pieces to make a kettle and a toaster. The energy in the particle collisions is so great that it drives E=mc² backwards and creates new matter. LHC didn't find a Higgs boson, it made one.

Production is one of several ways, higgs can also be pulled out of the field in much the same way many waves colliding at on spot can produce a huge standing wave. I think the predominant model is that  gluon spawn heavy  quark formation, and the heavies iirc interact pulling out a higgs. Since the higgs is Tachyonic in nature, and such particles are only stable in a quantum context, it quickly either rejoins the field or interacts to form other guage bosons. I havent really studied all the neogenic paths of the higgs, just that the heavy quarks are decent with enough energy to tug it out of its resting state in the field, they themselves are two heavy to be generated, but virtual provision, a probabilistic quantum effect of gluon interaction, allows for the creation of the higgs with gluon decay. In this stategy, the higgs coupling to the virtual heavies is intense 173 GeV/c2 for top quark and 4.3 for the bottom quark, the rest mass of the higgs is 256 GeV/c2. As vector bosons go, even short lived ones, thats a heck of alot of local interaction for the higgs. The higgs is typically interacts with things of a few GeV. 

Presumambly at the end of inflation, higgs particles and al sorts of exotic shortlived  particles poured into the universe, as it later expanded higgs entered the resting state imparting mass onto and thus stabilizing massive particles. The energies required to spontaneously create higgs would have been millions and billions times that of the LHC, so that the current field is the result of a different set of processes observed in the LHC. 

 

33 minutes ago, todofwar said:

So many theories of how science will end things fall down on closer inspection. One that annoys me is the idea that nanobots will consume the world because according to one article on the subject, everything at the atomic scale is basically the same so they can convert the world into more nanobots. Pretty sure there is an entire field or science that only exists because things are not the same at the atomic scale.

Back to this topic, I know there isn't cause to be concerned about black holes formed in the LHC, but just how big of a collider would we need to make one that will absorb more energy then it emits? 

I ignire these theories mainly because there will be disconnects in the sytem, people like myself who do not buy into clouds, phones that run thier lives, facebook, twitter, people who control media instead of having media control them. An example is KSP, 1.1 is out, although i had a steam version of KSP i ditched it because steam wanted to much control, i bought an amazon  copy, found that didn't work so migrated to direct purchase, maybe in a month or two months i will dowload the patched version of the program. I routinely wait for chips and software to be on the market for months/years before i purchase. Lol, still use XP and office 2007 at work, lol. I like to see how other folks get screwed before i stick my jewels into the wind. My main comp is hardwired, and i do pull the Rj45 out from time to time. 

[Kertech]

not a myth but feel tricked by the headline: weasel shuts down lhc, me thinking "oh a weasel causing a ruckus in the LHC how funny" no turns out it got electrocuted http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36173247

[PB666]

24 minutes ago, Kertech said:

not a myth but feel tricked by the headline: weasel shuts down lhc, me thinking "oh a weasel causing a ruckus in the LHC how funny" no turns out it got electrocuted http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36173247

Note I saw that article didn't think this was that place, but in a place thatvruns huge chains of electromagnets its not a suprise the weasel goes pop. 

Edited May 2, 2016 by PB666

[K^2]

3 hours ago, cantab said:

"A black hole of 4.5 × 10²² kg (about the mass of the Moon, or about 13 micrometers across) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits." - Wikipedia

What that means is that for a particle collider to create a stable black hole, it would need to be powered by a moon made of antimatter. Or, to put it another way, if you made a Dyson Sphere round the Sun absorbing all its energy output, and you waited for several hundred thousand years, you'd have charged up enough power for that particle collider to make one black hole.

The speed of light squared is a BIG number.

"Stable" is a subjective matter. A black hole that's "only" a few million tons would take decades to evaporate. And if you only need one for a few days, you can get away with almost reasonable mass.

Of course anything that could be made at LHC energies will only just last long enough to detect.

[cubinator]

Pretty sure there are tiny black holes popping up and disappearing everywhere, in space, in the sun, inside us. The LHC is nothing to worry about, the only bad thing I've heard it's done is kill a weasel. 

[sevenperforce]

13 hours ago, K^2 said:

"Stable" is a subjective matter. A black hole that's "only" a few million tons would take decades to evaporate. And if you only need one for a few days, you can get away with almost reasonable mass.

Of course anything that could be made at LHC energies will only just last long enough to detect.

Then again, any black hole made at any energy will only just last long enough to detect...because if it's large enough to last any longer than it takes to detect, it is large enough to destroy the detector. And you.

[Majorjim!]

Particle collisions in earths atmosphere are more energetic than those inside the LHC. There is zero risk of creating a world ending black hole.

[Darnok]

I have few questions about LHC...

How they measure mass of particles that are on move during experiment?

Does their hardware and software is able to detect particles moving faster than light?

 

[pincushionman]

10 minutes ago, Darnok said:

I have few questions about LHC...

How they measure mass of particles that are on move during experiment?

Does their hardware and software is able to detect particles moving faster than light?

 

Math. Knowing the properties of the electomagnetic fields in the test chamber, you can derive particle masses by studying the paths those particles are observed to follow. Sort of like how if you can obseve the orbits of a planet and its moon, you can determine both their masses.

And not faster than the speed of light. Close to it, though. But making it work is a serious engineering challenge.

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, pincushionman said:

20 minutes ago, Darnok said:

I have few questions about LHC...

How they measure mass of particles that are on move during experiment?

Does their hardware and software is able to detect particles moving faster than light?

Math. Knowing the properties of the electomagnetic fields in the test chamber, you can derive particle masses by studying the paths those particles are observed to follow. Sort of like how if you can obseve the orbits of a planet and its moon, you can determine both their masses.

And not faster than the speed of light. Close to it, though. But making it work is a serious engineering challenge.

I would point out that if some of the particles did exceed lightspeed, the LHC detectors would absolutely be able to detect it. 

[Darnok]

4 minutes ago, pincushionman said:

Math. Knowing the properties of the electomagnetic fields in the test chamber, you can derive particle masses by studying the paths those particles are observed to follow. Sort of like how if you can obseve the orbits of a planet and its moon, you can determine both their masses.

And not faster than the speed of light. Close to it, though. But making it work is a serious engineering challenge.

Estimate, but that is not equal to measure

[sevenperforce]

5 minutes ago, Darnok said:

Estimate, but that is not equal to measure

All measurements involve a margin of uncertainty. Uncertainty in measurement does not an estimation make.

[pincushionman]

42 minutes ago, Darnok said:

Estimate, but that is not equal to measure

A measurement is an estimate with well-established bounds. Even a direct measurement, like a beam balance, only works so long as the apparatus is well-defined and understood. In these cases, the "apparatus" used are better-established portions of the theory.

This is conceptually no different than using an electronic scale (which measures force, so you have to do math) to determine a mass in a lab rather than a beam balance (which works only when the balance and reference masses are shown to be correct).

[PB666]

2 hours ago, Darnok said:

I have few questions about LHC...

How they measure mass of particles that are on move during experiment?

Does their hardware and software is able to detect particles moving faster than light?

 

LHC has different detectors that perform both overlapping and unique functions.

ALICE -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALICE:_A_Large_Ion_Collider_Experiment - lead ion collider

ATLAS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS_experiment - Glorified proton collider

CMS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Muon_Solenoid - Compact muon solenoid

TOTEM - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTEM  - Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation

MoEDAL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoEDAL_experiment  - Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC

And others.

  

Quote

Particles that are produced in accelerators must also be observed, and this is the task of particle detectors. While interesting phenomena may occur when protons collide it is not enough to just produce them. Particle detectors must be built to detect particles, their masses, momentum, energies, lifetime, charges, and nuclear spins. In order to identify all particles produced at the interaction point where the particle beams collide, particle detectors are usually designed in layers like an onion. The layers are made up of detectors of different types, each of which is designed to observe specific types of particles. The different traces that particles leave in each layer of the detector allow for effective particle identification and accurate measurements of energy and momentum. (The role of each layer in the detector is discussed below.) As the energy of the particles produced by the accelerator increases, the detectors attached to it must grow to effectively measure and stop higher-energy particles. ATLAS is the largest detector ever built at a particle collider. - wiki ATLAS

Computer generated cut-away view of the ATLAS detector showing its various components
(1)Muon Detectors
Magnet system: (2) Toroid Magnets (3) Solenoid Magnet
Inner Detector: (4) Transition Radiation Tracker (5) Semi-Conductor Tracker (6) Pixel Detector
Calorimeters:  (7) Liquid Argon Calorimeter (8) Tile Calorimeter

The pixels detector is a huge matrix of detectors that track particles via electromagnetic discharge.http://bigbro.biophys.cornell.edu/research/pad/

Semi-Conductor (particle) Tracker  http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186274/how-do-tracking-detectors-in-particle-accelerators-create-the-pretty-pictures-we

Transition radiation tracker. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Keyword/71895/Transition-Radiation-Tracker

Calorimeters determine the remaining energies of tracked particles as they leave the detector.

 

 

[qeveren]

On 2016-05-01 at 4:05 PM, wumpus said:

The "strange matter" description didn't make much sense at all.  Also, if they are going to claim that not finding x after period y is some sort of answer, how many Higg's bosons were discovered before LHC?  I think the real difficulty is that shear definition of "strange matter" in that it is a soup of specific quarks: Fire up the energy enough and expect to convert a bit of energy into "some matter": why would "some matter" take *that* particular form?  And how would you tell if you had it?

Sill no idea what a "vacuum bubble" is.  Not sure what the difference between creating a "new big bang" and a "vacuum bubble" (with the obvious exception that a big bang fills the vacuum with matter).

On 'creating black holes'.  Don't nutrinos and similar create plenty of black holes already (as in more than the LHC)?

It's kind of silly, because I imagine the LHC creates strange matter quite frequently, just never stable strange matter.

A "vacuum bubble" is a kind of vague way of saying "vacuum metastability event".  In such a scenario our spacetime isn't actually the lowest vacuum energy state, it's sitting in a little "energy valley" somewhere above the lowest energy level.  Some event kicks off that nudges the local vacuum out of that valley and it falls to the actual lowest state, and-very much like the early moments of the Big Bang where the various forces separated from each other-the laws of physics in the new vacuum change.  This new, "true vacuum" then expands at the speed of light, annihilating the current universe.

[PB666]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2016/may/14/picturing-particles-the-evolution-of-event-displays