Yes. The LHC's collisions all occur in four specific locations, each < 0.1 mm across---and those spots are located in the centers of the world's most sophisticated, dedicated detectors; they all will occur over the course of a handful of years. Cosmic ray collisions occur at random locations spread out over millions of square miles, far from any reasonable detector, and are spread out over billions of years.
Large Hadron Collider feedback needed
- Thread starter MattusMaximus
- Start date
-
- Tags
- large hadron collider lhc
Yes. The LHC's collisions all occur in four specific locations, each < 0.1 mm across---and those spots are located in the centers of the world's most sophisticated, dedicated detectors; they all will occur over the course of a handful of years. Cosmic ray collisions occur at random locations spread out over millions of square miles, far from any reasonable detector, and are spread out over billions of years.
MattusMaximus
Intellectual Gladiator
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2006
- Messages
- 15,948
We are not doing the cosmic ray collisions that I mentioned - they are naturally occurring events that have been going on for billions of years. And despite the massive energies involved, millions of times greater than anything humanity can dish out in the LHC, the planet has survived this entire time.
And yes, the whole point of the LHC is to conduct repeatable and controlled experiments in particle physics. We just can't come close to doing it at the level of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.
http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=2825
Seems like they only will go upp to 2.2 TeV centermass energy before the winter shutdown doing proton to proton collisions.
Whats the highest proton to proton collision ever done before?
And whats the energy of the Tevatron?
Seems like they only will go upp to 2.2 TeV centermass energy before the winter shutdown doing proton to proton collisions.
Whats the highest proton to proton collision ever done before?
And whats the energy of the Tevatron?
2 TeV c.o.m.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Tevatron = 1Tev (thus its name) and I thnk that is the highest proton to proton collision ever done before.
Its one TeV for each beam. And, to be a pedant, it collides protons and anti-protons .
No, there is not a big difference between pp and pbar pbar collisions. THe "fundamental" high-energy collisions are between the constituent quark and gluons. Both p and pbar contain quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, so both types of beams can produce the same reactions. Protons are "dominated" by quarks in a certain sense, and antiprotons are "dominated" by antiquarks, so a p-pbar collider will generate more high-energy q-qbar collisions than a p-p collider.
The highest energy pp collider is RHIC, with a number of runs colliding proton beams at 500 GeV (250 GeV per beam).
Why were the fearmongers afraid for RHIC and now the LHC and not the Tevatron which has been online for so long.
Is proton and anti proton collisions more safe or whats the deal? I have been searching for people who were against the Tevatron but i found none.
MattusMaximus
Intellectual Gladiator
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2006
- Messages
- 15,948
I can only guess that the fearmongers were asleep at the proverbial switch back then. Thankfully.
The LHC is going to be online soon, i guess we will see some fearmongers in the media pretty soon.
Thanks to the media there were allot of people who had serious nervous breakdowns last year because of that and the missinformation they gave people.
Thanks to the media there were allot of people who had serious nervous breakdowns last year because of that and the missinformation they gave people.
The highest energy cosmic rays that have been observed are on the order of 1020eV. The LHC will collide particles with centre of mass energy of 1.4*1013eV (that is, each particle will have 7 TeV, so the collision itself will contain double the energy of a single particle). We're not talking just a bit lower energy with some room for error, we're talking well over a million times lower energy.
Have a look at this picture. It shows the frequency that cosmic rays of different energies hit the Earth. For the 1013eV or so that the LHC will be at, you can see that's one particle hitting every square metre of the Earth every 106 seconds - that's about every 10 days. Looked at another way, that's about 500 million particles with that energy hitting the Earth every second.
sol invictus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2007
- Messages
- 8,613
It's the center of mass energy that matters, not the energy of the cosmic ray alone. For a cosmic ray hitting a stationary proton in the atmosphere, the CM energy is roughly the geometric mean of the CR energy and the proton's rest energy. That's only a bit more than an order of magnitude greater than the LHC, nowhere near a factor of a million.
So whats the highest CM energy in real cosmic ray collisions compared to the LHC?
Mr Clingford
Master Poster
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2003
- Messages
- 2,104
MattusMaximus
Intellectual Gladiator
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2006
- Messages
- 15,948
The highest recorded CM energy in naturally occurring cosmic ray collisions is about 1020 eV, as compared to about 14x1012 eV for the LHC. That is, the LHC collisions are roughly 107 (or 10,000,000) times less energetic.
By comparison, the LHC is a wuss.