Thursday, September 11, 2008

First Full LHC Test A Success

At 10:28 (local) on Sep 10, 2008, the LHC test of sending a proton beam right around the 27km circuit was announced as a success! WOOHOO. This is excellent news. As you may have figured, my business is named after a family of subatomic particles - Quarks - because of the amount of research I had to do on them in 1984 to prove to a science teacher I had that they actually existed and that his knowledge wasn't all-encompassing. Well, Quarks are as real as I am - which now dispels the hope that some people had that I was just a bad figment of their imagination! :)

So, if you have a look at the CERN Press site, you can see the press release as well as a number of pictures of what the control room was like during this initial full test.

Currently they are tuning beam 2 - have a look at the LHC Beam Setup page to see what's being seen by the CERN control room.

Progress towards the first collision is good - we should see the first collision by sometime later this year if all keeps going well and some real results from the LCH in the next year. Things are looking promising for discovering what mass and gravity actually are.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

1 comment:

stryqx said...

The UK UNIX Users Group had a presentation at their File and Backup Seminar earlier this year given by Dr. Charles Curran of CERN titled "Storage at (almost) the Speed of Light". The slide deck can be found here.

Basically, they're generating 15PB a year at rates up to 1.5GB/s (130TB/day). And they've got to keep this data for about 10 years. That's a lot of tapes.