Waiting For Tom Hanks

NewsHammer Exclusive No question the Large Hadron Collider scored a brilliant success with its first collisions at 7 TeV. Considering the extreme complexity of the detectors/ reactors this was a breathless performance. Soon after the 1 PM Geneva start, all four massive experiments were delivering data during the 3 hour window.

The first particle tracks and jets that were recorded surprised and delighted the physicists at CERN. At 7 TeV something new was going on that hadn't been seen before at any other collider, the signals of a New Physics. Though if you managed to sit through CERN's live webcast all day March 30, (video highlights: LHC First Physics) at least an interminable 27 km long, you still wouldn't have found out what that New Physics was or what CERN physicists were thinking. The only relevant comment I heard was that some muons were produced, and as they are decay products from heavier particles, some massive particles should have been produced, what CERN hopes for including the massive Higgs.


Great To Be Alive

With everyone so dazed and happy for the collider, by the time the CERN Press Conference started even the mostly 20-something journalists forgot to ask any new or relevant questions. It was one of those great cathartic moments where you're thrilled to have survived the biggest physics experiment ever when it's a hundred meters under your feet.

Confusing anyway to get focused on results with a loud echo for the first half-hour and more loud simultaneous French translation overlapping. Good thing CERN A/V wasn't running any important experiments. On camera four spokespersons and "two people waiting in Japan" weren't deterred. Another spokesperson for CERN PR coordinating the spokespersons and reporters while walking around the wireless mic kept tripping over the "two people" on the live video feed. "Two people waiting in Japan" who maybe had a comment? What were "two people" doing in Japan? What "two people"? The not just any "two people" turned out to be Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's Director of Research and Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but anyway they were happy enough splitting a bottle of 1991 red collider wine, the year CERN started thinking about the LHC.

The only memorable quote of the day came from Dr Bertolucci:

"The most exciting thing is we are just mapping the unknown. And so the most striking things will be the unexpected things we might find there."

Fabiola? Wrong Control Room

Though we've heard variations on this theme from just about everyone. For the "unexpected things" well they're unexpected but at least we should be told just how much time we have before they arrive. CERN knows more or less but CERN won't say in so many words. Not even what the March 30 departure point was or where's the blasted finish line. Is today a sprint or the stage one of the marathon? What stages exactly? 7 TeV doesn't really cover it but it sounds great, another collider record. Get the camera Fabiola!

Listening very closely that day some of us were sort of warned. Piecing it together from the friendly banter the LHC was still taking its first "baby" steps. Mama and Papa CERN were very proud. If there was a buzz word through that exhausting day, it was "baby" and double that for "new babies" from our excited Italian hostess, who was doing nearly all the talking for everybody in her webcast from control room to control room while two guys were chatting in a loud French voiceover, like at the back of a church. They had some interesting things to say if you could hear them. Thanks CERN A/V, a division of CERN PR, leaving us hankering for Tom Hanks in the final analysis.

Instead of a nice clean start, say 2 minutes of CERN's objectives for the day or a Press Release on that: how many bunches of protons, how many protons per bunch for this first 7 TeV experiment -- a lot of happy and excited people at CERN were telling us over and over again how happy they were for and hours and hours. Sure we're glad they're all happy. But being so very happy about all the ''new babies" the collider was having, our hostess and her physicists forgot what millions of people out there wanted to know. Was she going to bring them coffee?

Even 40 Live Status LHC Pages were no help with how many bunches were loaded into the collider that day: The CERN variation on Russian Roulette.

Bits of what we needed to know did come out in gurgles. ATLAS was having fewer "babies", only about 30 per second, while CMS was having 100 "babies" per second, and LHCb went from 50 to 60 "new babies", but we never did find out if ALICE got knocked-up down the rabbit hole until we saw the "baby" scan and hers were certainly hairier than any other "new babies", so Wow.


ALICE Hairy Baby Scan

The "babies" were collision events of course, 2 protons making one collision "baby", but the mother of all colliders obviously wasn't making "babies" the way she should. Where were all the other "babies"? Once upon a time CERN was forecasting 1 million collisions per second per experiment. Later on at the mighty ATLAS we got the new ultimate forecast: 40 million "babies" per second in each detector or times 4 making 160 million per second overall.


Squeezing More Babies

Evidently for now something was wrong. Not enough squeezing going on, or a low proton count. Both as it turned out, but you had to beam down via the Internet and watch the naked collider in action. The first clue was March 29, NewsHammer "CERN Fires The Collider" when only 2 bunches per beam made it into the collider round. Then bright and early March 30 there were 2 aborted ramps to get stable beams and with millions of people getting bored CERN tried square one. With the "baby" machine feeling testy, the absolute minimum 1 bunch per beam was knocked in instead of 2 or the nominal 2808 bunches per beam we were told to expect for years and years.


10 Billion Protons Instead of 561,600 Billion Protons

Then how many protons? The maximum per bunch is 100 billion according to CERN. Nobody said how many protons before, during or since March 30, but one of the two French guys in the background voiceover did mention "5 milliards de protons" or 5 billion, or 1/20 the nominal number of protons per bunch. So at most there were 10 billion protons that could have collided, or in overall terms the very rock bottom minimum or the lowest possible luminosity next to zero. The maximum intensity would have been 2 x 2808 x 100 billion for a very large number of protons circulating eventually or 561,600 billion. Versus 10 billion protons March 30, meaning the LHC achieved 1/56,160 of its potential in protons. Far less than that when it comes to LHC luminosity or the ultimate shootout at CERN's OK Corral.

During the webcast we did catch 2 other related facts. At 10 billion protons in the collider, maximum collisions in any one detector would be 11,000 per second where at CMS with the most "babies" there were 100 per second. ATLAS was aiming for 40 million collisions per second in any detector, but not today.


CMS On Top

CMS with the best score achieved 100/40,000,000 or 1/400,000 of what it can do at 7 TeV. Or at the per second OK Corral Rehearsal 200 bullets smashed into each other vs 80 million that will smash one of these days.

If all goes well late next year we might see maximum luminosity at 7 TeV or 400,000 times more collisions per second. In 2013 the ultimate proton fireball at 14 TeV will be over (no typo) 100 billion times the core temperature of our sun or ~ 10^16 °C.

Step 4: "Don't panic." Good advice from an LHC operating manual.

Hot enough for ya? will be something to brag about if there's anyone left at CERN.


ATLAS Trying For Better Days

So the big event March 30 was a very small physics experiment, though with some risk to the LHC machine. Because of the way CERN handled it and the media reported it, there's a general sigh of relief. We're still here, the LHC is safe. Nothing more to worry about after the Barnum and Bailey Collider Test.

Nothing wrong with going for the smallest possible test at 7 TeV. The smart and prudent way to go, except when you don't disclose the facts clearly and let people imagine they're getting the full Big Bang for their buck. Echoes of "There's one born every minute."


LHCb: What You Say?

Belatedly offering soundbites to the media on increasing collisions to 300 per second and a stab at luminosity, again after the brouhaha of March 30, is more you-knew-all-along sleight of hand through the back door for millions of empty chairs who won't complain. Making lame excuses before the collisions like the LHC would be colliding beams together over the Atlantic, in case of PR failure, was rather embarrassing, though a genuine attempt at some false modesty.

Canceling the Tom Hanks Show at the collider was the biggest CERN event. It finally dawned on CERN that the most important physics experiment since Trinity should be treated seriously. The live interactive video/data player for the webcast was first rate and another positive step. But being hustled into CERN's Big Top for a handful of firecrackers like this is it, The Greatest Show on Earth, is another sad comment on how easy it is to fool people.

You can make allowances for any live event, that the excitement overtakes the action and the facts. But CERN has had years to get the facts across and a week since March 30 for revisiting unfortunate false impressions. The postmortem CERN Press Release "Yes we did it" makes no corrections.

Of course there are no bragging rights if CERN simply stated in advance and during the March 30 demonstration that the 7 TeV test collisions were slated for about 1/400,000 of design efficiency. Then of course nothing of LHC safety would be proved either, except that the LHC is apparently safe to operate at an extremely tiny fraction of its potential. Now that the public is satisfied with safety CERN can go to the LHC maximum. Not right away, as the machine is unreliable. Failures since start-up including this week are common. Luminosity consequently has to be coaxed up in stages or there will be no more "babies"and no more collider.

Go slow is commendable to save the collider from another accident. But why not tell us? It was no secret inside CERN, just outside.

The biggest safety issue has always been the LHC's New Physics. Now apparent safety (of small numbers) of 7 TeV collisions will be taken as a proof of safety for what is to come.

Actual physics results even from March 30 may never be fully known. Dangerous sorts of Collider Objects might have been produced and might have gone undetected during the 3 hour run of March 30 of about 1/2 million proton collisions recorded. What will happen in 2011 in a proton fireball of 40 million collisions per second? When the truth is known, you can fly.


CERN's Smoking Gun

CERN had already predetermined that First Physics at 7 TeV would be 1 proton bunch per beam, 1 x 1 for the first three days of collisions, then a week of tests on multi-bunches, then a jump to 4 x 4 or 4 bunches per beam colliding for another 2 days. Then a bigger jump to 12 x 12 collisions for 2 more days. Then who knows? Though CERN hasn't been able to achieve these results due to ongoing machine failures.

Down the road: "BEAM PARAMETERS AND MACHINE PERFORMANCE TO BE REACHED IN 2010"*.

What we can expect now is less machine risk as proton bunches are gradually maximized in stages. It will take until the end of this year to reach about 800 bunches per beam out of 2808, another lucky fact blown out of CERN's windy webcast. Luminosity will still continue climbing next year to the maximum.

The obscure but essential CERN document (above) "Pilot physics run at 3.5 TeV"* should have been released to the public before March 30 or summed up in a CERN Press Release. Just a reminder to CERN that Press Releases are for the Press and provide the Press with tools, not more hot air to analyze. This short document would have made CERN's intentions clear on going slow (adding the rationale: the minimizing of machine failures and damage) and that would have pre-empted all the phony suspense of March 30. We could have got some more sleep instead.

The Future At 7 TeV

So we're not much further ahead in knowing what to expect from the LHC. The preliminary data and continuing collisions will give physicists some ideas, but data analysis isn't that easy. It could take months to see some New Physics papers on what happened.

Even so physicists will be reluctant to draw conclusions from a few collision events, which is why they want to see 40 million per second.

The funny thing is, because of the enormous amount of data these collisions produce, CERN's entire computing power can only record 2,000 events per second. So CERN will filter all data, discarding nearly all of it, hoping their filters will capture only the significant events, whatever they are.

For now and since CERN decided to blast us with Collider PR 10 years ago, we're in another prolonged state of suspense. When is the axe going to fall? Certainly it looks like there is a better chance for safety in terms of shutting down before hazardous events arrive, if data analysis can determine the next threshold where New Physics might spin out of control. Though there are no guarantees that we'll have any bumpy warnings. Just ask ALICE when she's 10 feet tall.


LHC News: Doomsday Postponed

As to the future, the only real news out of the Press Conference was delivered by Steve Meyers, Director of Accelerators and Technology who talked about some long term goals and difficulties, announcing the next planned shutdown in Autumn 2011. After a year of upgrades to safety systems for another $235 Million (not mentioned) the LHC should be ready to start 14 TeV collisions in 2012, though giant bending magnets will still be difficult to retrain, some 1/3 of about 1,800 (not mentioned) needing 25 to 30 ramps and quenches. The much fabled LHC might have to settle for 13 TeV.

*Note to CERN Techies: Put dates on all your documents. If Plan "A" is PR Mystification, your Plan "B" Common Timeline Confusion will mystify everyone else at CERN who needs to sift through a mountain of links to a mountain chain of documents that might save your life.

This is Part 7 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high energies starting March 30, 2010. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Part 3: Higgs Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider / More Delays

NewsHammer Part 4: Scrubbing CMS Data At The LHC

NewsHammer Part 5: LHC Lords Of The Ring

NewsHammer Part 6: CERN Fires The Collider


--Alan Gillis

Nice Collider. What's it do?

NewsHammer Exclusive The big question today for tomorrow at the Large Hadron Collider is what happened to Tom Hanks? He's the guy CERN asked to push The Button at the last Collider Party back in 2008, the media splash before the 2008 accident. Tom said he wouldn't miss it and since then has been doing some serious hanging around.

Last year Tom rolled back in with his Angels and Demons tour at the LHC, trading a honey wagon full of A&D T-shirts for a million dollars of free publicity. The cover story for the secret button rehearsal probably, as there are a lot of buttons at the LHC including "retry" "ignore error" "clear error" and "kill"on the BadAstronomy Tour.

Though the big deal, rumor has it, was Ron Howard bringing along his lucky Happy Days lunch pail to sneak through CERN security, both in and out, in case of an A&D 2 where a mad scientist at CERN takes home some serious micro black holes, you guessed it, and drops off his less suspicious by several orders of magnitude Hannah Montana lunch pail at the Vatican.

Did CERN run out of anti-matter already? A lot of people will be disappointed, at least if Tom doesn't show up tomorrow. Who else would you trust to push The Button? I'd go with Kevin Spacey for an ambiguous real life touch, the slightly nervous button, the wisp of a smile, the you asked for it Boom so here it is.

Or Jim Carrey for some real collider frenzy.

In any case, don't worry about tomorrow. CERN isn't, CERN has it all figured out. If CERN loses we all lose. End of story. If CERN wins, CERN will be back to try it again at full power later this year, full luminosity as it's called but never explained by CERN on 20 websites promoting the LHC. Call it maximized beams at 2808 proton bunches per beam, the maximum bunches, the max protons, but all that still at tomorrow's half-power 3.5 Trillion Electron Volts times two for 7 TeV collisions. If maximized tomorrow (no way) that's about the momentary focused power of 1400 Nuclear Power Plants.

A la carte: Two Proton Potatoes Per Beam

Last December's record 2.36 TeV collisions were also not maximized, a paltry million collisions recorded by CMS. What we'll get tomorrow in terms of luminosity could be small potatoes again. CERN could inject as little as 2 proton bunches per beam out of 2808 as in a test today, March 29, 2010 at 20:40:17 (above image) with bragging rights as all flags turned green. Wow, Stable Beams, 4 bunches through the LHC, Beam 1 about 3000 GeV or 3 TeV and Beam 2 at about 2400 GeV or 2.4 TeV. So tomorrow looks suspiciously like a repeat of today except there will be collisions of a minor order while CERN claims success and safety with as little as 4 bunches. Might be more, though will CERN tell us how many?

Recall last time when CERN did not even accelerate protons in September 2008, using just their injection energy of 0.45 TeV per beam, not even colliding beams, yet claiming a great success on the non-accelerating non-colliding LHC and safety of course. Doomsday a bust. Collider a bust days later without beams.

Well impossible anyway with no collisions for one thing, and no danger at low power collisions when the Tevatron has been safely colliding (not official however) at 2.1 TeV, not the 1.96 TeV reported by CERN when CERN claimed its 2.36 TeV record this December finally. Go figure.

March 30, 20110: The Day Something Or Nothing Happened

So what will happen tomorrow? According to CERN's crystal ball, we will have safe collisions at 7 TeV. Take it away Tom Hanks: Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today. If maximum collision energies were tried at 7 TeV or about 75 times the power of the Tevatron, this could fry the collider and 200 journalists there for the worst thing of all, a PR disaster. If safe at low luminosity CERN won' t advertise that fact as it didn't in December at 2.36 TeV or more recently this month when CERN claimed 3.5 TeV test beams.


We could be left to assume (wrongly) that the collisions of tomorrow will be maximum luminosity at 7 TeV. Only a handful of science journalists with some physics will know what luminosity is, some won't ask and none will tell us, as they never have bothered before. It's not their responsibility to question the value of this experiment, just report what CERN says. In the end with 10,000 physicists, CERN must know what it is doing. Though it may be one of those quantum counter-intuitive problems. You think CERN knows but CERN doesn't. Or the answer is under CERN's nose, 27 km of collider built by CERN to find out what CERN doesn't know.

What happens tomorrow? If things go wrong, it will be all over eBAY at least:

CERN And Toyota Deals

Used collider with some front-end damage, about $8 Billion to fix. Original Toyota Accelerator Warranty transferable. New owner can sue.

The Giddings and Mangano Cosmic Ray Argument is finally being put to some good use. Micro Black Holes safe, Toyota Microchips not so safe. The mania for microchips has gone so far that the latest generation of micro-microchips relies only on a hundred electrons to push gateway data, too small to fight Cosmic Ray battles launched from Space. And by the way, what happens to all the non-radiation-hardened microprocessors and other electronics and equipment CERN forgot to shield or redesign at the LHC when the extreme ionizing including nuclear energies produced by the LHC blast the collider day after day? Your mounting radiation hazards suddenly discovered at the LHC after 10 or 15 years. In comparison Toyota Cosmic Ray bombardment is insignificant except for Toyotas.

What happens tomorrow? CERN tells us via the CERN cypher. Closer, closer and when CERN copy becomes a blur, read between the lines. The four major experiments will have webcasts, meaning from their control rooms, as the underground LHC is off limits during hazardous beam events, including the standard radiation events they produce like heavy X-rays for one type of trouble right around the 27 km ring, a consequence just of forced magnetic bending of proton beams.

Webcasts from CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, and ALICE, plus from computer central, the LHC CCC, CERN's main control room. Or in other words there will be collisions in all four main detectors/ reactors. So why not say so? Is it a secret? A surprise? Will Tom Hanks mysteriously transport from Arcturus, the movie, through the LHC Stargate from Lost to push The Button after all?

Why bother with this media event? Isn't this a science experiment? Even if there is no accident, no apparent trouble, we will see no results. It will take weeks to analyze computer data. That's all we have. No one can eyeball these experiments that will generate the momentary heat of our Sun magnified X times. No X value from CERN. The low power RHIC collider at Brookhaven produced 4 Trillion C or 7 Trillion F temperatures in a flash of fusing gold ions at a minuscule 0.2 TeV, or way hotter than the core temperature of our Sun or any star.

No CERN talking heads at the scheduled Press Conference tomorrow will know what happened, not even the CERN computer systems will be able to report on the production of new Collider Objects, like Black Holes or Strangelets, not in real time. If they are produced and if they are detected they might destroy Geneva before we get the computer data.

Why bother convincing us again and again it won't happen? Didn't we buy this collider? Didn't we pay $10 Billion? Why try to re-sell us on it? Do we have buyers' remorse? Do we need Collider Therapy? Just having some fun are we? Collider Roulette? Then what's wrong with the LHC? Why the endless sales pitch in the media from CERN? Every week The CERN News: Why We Fight The Collider War. Are we losing? What's wrong now?


Hey ALICE Call LHC CCC

Plenty if you look at the data to date. The CERN screenshots on this page from LHC systems performance since March 21, 2010 tell the story. Click to read.


Cryogenics Twilight Zone

LHC Cooldown Status since January, tells us of recurring cryo glitches in the same Twilight Zones, Sector 1-2 and Sector 2-3, or along 1/4 of the LHC ring of 27 km of wonky machine. Anybody notice? Nothing to worry about, but click on the screenshots to read the graphs and the comments from CERN Control Center on daily machine failures including unscheduled or real Emergency Beam Dumps.

Can't say I like the look of these dozens of monitors, at least the public ones on the Internet, that CERN uses too, that don't tell us or CERN of overall machine status. Unless they were on fire, they quietly say nothing you want to know Now. CERN had the same problem with access points where personnel didn't know if there were or weren't any hazards going in (kid you not) not even a Green-Yellow-Red flag system in place before the 2008 accident. Same thing with all these screens. How safe are we? Condition Red? Yellow? Green? How about a bright Status Bar on every screen? Flashing Idiot Lights? Automatic Woopee Cushions for all that collider control room fatigue.

How many bunches per beam? Actual luminosity per beam vs maximum? Actual TeV per beam though we have that in fine print. Graph the beams properly. Relying instead on a Fast Beam Current Transformer to graph Intensity on a shifting scale with tiny numbers? Re-jiggle that in your head? Ever heard of human error? Collisions when, where? See LHC3? What is happening NOW? Is this a $3.99 Collider at Target?

For some Keys to reading CERN codes on these screenshots of LHC1 pages see LHC Portal. Then CERN's own modest attempts. For ATLAS decoded and CMS decoded on SymmetryBreaking. For 20 pages of LHC Live Status starting with LHC1. And 19 multi-screen live views starting with LHCDataWide.

Watch Fire The Collider March 30, 2010 Live From The LHC

CERN webcasts from 08:30 to 18:15 CEST or Geneva Time or 6 hours earlier in New York or starting at 2:30 AM. Go to this CERN page for Twitters and Links to Schedules and Live Webcasts.

If we all make it through tomorrow, CERN has a series of cliffhangers lined up that will spook us maybe for years to come, all the way up to maximum-maximum 1150 TeV lead ion collisions maybe in 2013, after the LHC shuts down again for a year to fix problems not fixed yet for safe 14 TeV proton collisions and the 1150 TeV lead collisions. In September 2008 the LHC was on a roll and almost ready to go all the way CERN kept insisting, at least to 10 TeV until the $40 Million 2008 accident. Now a year and a half later it's another $235 Million to go all the way or maybe not, maybe if there's more money.

Get Stallone. CERN Wants Another Cliffhanger

Altogether we're another 3 years away from the original Stage 1 of the LHC experiment which is currently 4 years behind schedule.

Stage 2 is radiation hardening of equipment (neglected for 10 to 15 years) and moving vulnerable power supplies for more civil engineering for lots more money CERN wants (well over $100 Million) to bring the collider back to a Safe Long Term Stage 1. Stage 3 is to upgrade luminosity massively for way more power with 3 new and/or improved pre-accelerators for something over $1 Billion more. At least some old LEP equipment needs to be scrapped in any case, the LINAC and PS and the 6 year old SPS doesn't make the grade either if you replace the LINAC and PS. At least CERN isn't in a big hurry now. Buys us a little more time to freak out before 14 Terra Firma.

Upgrade The New LHC

The new improved Super LHC? Yeah and what's this one supposed to do?

What bank would give you a dollar if you told the manager a story like that?

This is Part 6 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies starting March 30, 2010. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Part 3: Higgs Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider / More Delays

NewsHammer Part 4: Scrubbing CMS Data At The LHC

NewsHammer Part 5: LHC Lords Of The Ring

--Alan Gillis

The Compact Muon Solenoid

NewsHammer Exclusive Not just any magnet, but the biggest solenoid ever built, with about as much steel as the Eiffel Tower. A machine within a machine, 1 of 4 giant experiments within the immense LHC collider complex. The Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS is also like the other experiments, a reactor and a complex of detectors. The M in CMS refers to 3 Muon detector systems, but it has others as well designed to track the particle zoo release from collisions.

Each experiment has its particular focus, but essentially they work the same way. When particle beams are accelerated around the LHC ring to near light speed, the two beams traveling in opposite directions are squeezed together and forced to collide in each detector. In the CMS it's done by a extreme 3.8 Tesla magnetic field. Whatever event is produced is not only monitored and analyzed, but the collision products are contained within the magnetic bottle. So far at low energies up to 2.36 TeV last December in the CMS, there was the usual shower of new particles and some unexpected extras.

Shiny New CMS Goes For A Test Drive

The collider buzz wasn't about results. CERN was all excited about the spectacular performance of what could have been a giant red Ferrari parked outside the Globe. It got its own CERN paper written by pages and pages of physicists who work on CMS, and wow were they ever excited. They were so excited by the fabulous specs, the sheer power of the CMS million liter 2.36 TeV with 10,000 valves, the amazing bells and whistles on the biggest dashboard you ever saw, the va-va-va-vrooom as it turned all the corners impeccably, they forgot to analyze the data.

They got some down on a million souvenir DVDs for later but some obvious extra mesons couldn't be ignored blasting out of the extreme exhaust. No sweat, just a bit of smoke. Only 10% to 14% more charged hadrons than expected. Specifically more Kaons and Pions, these quark re-arangements of basic quarks and antiquarks that should more or less decay into muons.

Since 2.36 TeV was in Terra Incognita, it might be just one of those things. Not exactly a problem when the two predictive models based on lower power collisions didn't exactly agree either, or not a problem anyway, just more mesons rising a bit steeply at new higher energies and maybe a trend at still higher energies where they could well be a problem when the LHC collides heavy lead ions maybe this Fall. Paraphrased directly from the BBC report.

Never mind, the big question is why? Why more mesons? Are these new new mesons produced from fusion energy? From smashing protons into quarks that recombined? Or is something else going on? Come on BBC. Ask the right questions. I know, they're usually better with farm animals and foreign potentates.

But is CERN any better with protons? We think we understand why physicists were too excited to analyze the CMS data scientifically. Often there's so much data you have to toss out most of it to make any sense of what is left. There are various sophisticated computer programs for that developed out of the bad old days of nuclear physics when physicists were designing A-Bombs at Los Alamos. Code name: Monte Carlo.


Original GEANT-Zéro Monte Carlo Generator

CERN had its old GEANT program and they're still using GEANT-4 that spews out particles in Fortran. GEANT-Zéro really should be in a museum instead of this abandoned ?LEP Hangar? but CERN is very attached to the good old days of particle physics, when Nuclear sounded important. Here a technician wearing a lab coat and latex gloves drops the particles into a mechano-'opper (out of frame, left). The center dial is spun randomly and then physicists go for coffee. When they come back the first batch of Monte Carlo'd particles is ready. If there are still too many mesons or other troublesome particles, the new smaller sample is re-Monte Carlo'd.

If there are still problems with data or the usual disagreements in interpretation of data, there is the Roulette Option for testing algorithms and a weekend bus trip by Car is arranged to a nearby casino like Chamonix. Now of course they are called Collider Conferences and unfortunately some real work must be done. Presentations. Taking notes on the back of envelopes. The piercing question. Gone are the days of gleaming prop planes chartered to Monaco with physicists waving their perpetual sandwiches, talking and too busy to eat.

Still we can't be sure exactly what happened to the CMS data. It seems to have gone through both systems and came out without a scratch. Blasted mesons! Troublesome little things getting in the way of serious data like pixel performance. Is that the only answer?

Of course there should be New Physics but this is just too soon for that. A few small collisions at low power for CMS calibration. But CERN should remember that New Physics comes mostly from physicists and not the collider. Unexpected results may have unexpected causes. Studies should be done. Trying to elbow the mesons out of the collider and worry about them later when there are more of them interfering with data, sounds rather medieval. Especially when it is possible that some Kaons might form Strangelets and then you'd have a real 5-star collider emergency. More on Strangelets later.

But a second event at the CMS should have alerted 2,500 physicists about the extra muons.

The Strange Case Of The Misbehaving Magnet

The other totally unexpected main event at CMS this past December hasn't been advertised at all by CERN.

Seems the CMS actually does increase beam power when its On. CERN discovered the effect over the entire 27 km length of beams. From this Steve Meyer's Powerpoint slide shown (below) at the December 18, 2009 CERN meeting, we see the ideal "Santa Klaus" proton beam whipping around very near the speed of light.

CMS Off, Santa Ho Ho Ho

CMS On, What Happened Santa?

Beam energy changes? And that's at the usual operating power of 3.8 Tesla in the CMS, ring magnets much weaker to handle low energy 1.18 TeV beams at that time. Earth's field is an extremely low 0.000032 Tesla in comparison.

What about collisions in the CMS detector/reactor? Will they too be more powerful? Will the extreme magnetic field of CMS sustain a fusion reaction between beams or sustain collider objects produced? Need some physics papers on this, but like a lot of other risk scenarios, lower power colliders are taken as proof of safety. But no collider before the LHC is remotely equivalent.

You would think there would be a big buzz at Chamonix, the CERN conference last month, but I couldn't find anything on the CMS boosting beam energy in the many reports presented on the LHC. One of those things no physicist will forget to talk about, at least over coffee. A first in collider physics. Being studied now certainly by CERN, but CERN's not waiting for studies. The unstoppable LHC is being powered up again for new beams. Will CERN be more cautious about running experiments? Yes, there's already been an encouraging change to the beam schedule. The first run will be back to 0.45 TeV injection beams instead of a jump to 3.5 TeV. Though CERN has been powering the ring magnets to handle these higher energies. The LHC could still jump through the 3.5 TeV hoop in a day.

But CERN has more to worry about.

After all there was another unexplained event in the same Myers' presentation, P24 screenshot of "Food for thought – V blow up of beam 2" or the LHC's first beam explosion December 11, 2009. More on that later.

Two Added Trajectory Energies To Destroy The LHC?

Higher than expected energies as in Part 2 might be higher still with another Trajectory Energy added to the mix.

You have the 3.8 Tesla CMS magnetic bottle to contain the fusion reaction as in other ordinary fusion reactors, but at the LHC beams are forcibly circulated through it. Part of the effect? Beams push their way through the extremely high CMS magnetic field. In a similar way, Richard Shurtleff's added Trajectory Energy for beams through gravity could also be applied to beams through extremely high magnetic fields, I would say.

Proofs Available From CMS?

The CMS apparent boost to beam energy, looks like a proof of this new added Trajectory Energy through magnetic fields.

The 'discarded' extra unexpected muons produced also in CMS suggest collision energies were higher than 2.36 TeV and so produced more muons. This could be a proof of Shurtleff's original Trajectory Energy through gravity and would include the other Trajectory Energy I'm proposing through magnetic fields at CMS.

Both energies might be magnified at higher and higher TeV.

On Trajectory Energy added by gravity interactions, Shurtleff thinks that at higher and higher TeV energies, ultimately energies of LHC 14 TeV collisions could double to 28 TeV. And that's without considering the other Trajectory Energy.

To paraphrase Holmes, when you eliminate the impossible, you are left with the probable and the unknown.

It's up to CERN to find out what they are dealing with. They have the physicists and about half the world's supply of them. Powering up the collider blithely to 3.5 TeV and for 7 TeV collisions could have other unexpected results like destruction of the LHC.

The Elusive Obvious Effect When Gravity Is Considered Weak

If you force particles through a vacuum pipe at maximum speed near light speed and that's always your constant, with enough RF or microwave energy applied for 3.5 TeV, you have a 3.5 TeV beam. Do the same thing against gravity and you have 3.5 TeV plus you've added extra energy to overcome the gravity or G.

But here's the thinking: Gravity is weak and so can be disregarded. Usually left out of equations. Maybe not so weak. Maybe it's a force acting on several dimensions, and only appears to be weak. Physicists are still trying to understand Quantum gravity. LHC beams also work on a Quantum scale. What will happen?

Force your beam against an extreme magnetic field M, and you have 3.5 TeV plus G and plus M or 2 added Trajectory Energies in addition to 3.5 TeV. Anyone care for a game of Quantum magnetism?

Say if you had water instead of a vacuum in your beam pipe, you would have to overcome the drag by water with more energy W to achieve the same near light speed and energy or particle density of your beam. Here W=G+M. Giddings and Mangano are you listening?

Considering CERN has invested in 9,300 superconducting magnets all supercooled at super expense, you think electro-magnetism and extreme fields would be well understood at the LHC. The CMS would be no surprise?

Anybody studying the effects of extreme magnetic fields on collisions and their products? Seems magnetic effects like gravity are ignored as unimportant as other small colliders haven't encountered problems. It's Collider Weather. What can you do about it anyway?

Could be a similar effect with the other main detectors like ATLAS that also has a similar tremendous but toroidal magnetic field. Also a solenoid, tricky combo. Can somebody check? Hey Steve!

Back To Observed Effects At CMS And The LHC

CERN should be able to measure the boost noted in December in beam energies achieved by CMS when beams were at 1.18 TeV. OK, so try again then to duplicate and study this before going to higher energies. Why not announce the need to run the LHC again at 1.18 TeV to double check findings? No, nothing. Is CERN still in a hurry to get glamorous 7 TeV collisions? Leaving upstart colliders, like RHIC getting the glory for Quark Soup, in the dust.

That's it. Can't think of everything and so we find out by experiment: Saves time to go ahead beams blazing, if the experiment doesn't destroy the LHC.

Still it's been the case at the LHC until the accident of 2008, that machine effects don't matter. Physicists tell engineers what they want and that's what they'll get. Not in 2008. And then a hundred committees try to coordinate everything. Fiddly stuff gets scrutinized under a microscope and the big stuff like untested unmonitored busbars or mounting radiation hazards falls through the cracks with a boom.

This was a disregard of known hazards at other colliders. Complicated by obsession and ambition. If CERN had been paying serious attention to all these articles in The Science of Conundrums about known hazards, and shortfalls at the LHC due to extreme complexity of the project and the resulting 27 km machine, CERN might have reconsidered their hurry-up mission for New Physics. In the end the LHC experiment was obviously dependent on billions of dollars of hardware working and working safely. It didn't. Now add unknown beams and collisions?

Into The Unknown

We now come into the realm of the unknown being explored with unknown energies, by a machine maybe or maybe not in control of the unknown. It won't be the control room operators in CCC who will exercise the control, not when events will occur literally a few meters short of light speed. The machine will be in charge.

Of course there will be unknown effects and unknown interactions. Physicists have been surprised many times by their own research. But here the scale of research at the giant LHC into New States of Matter called a much friendlier New Physics, is of a vastly different order.

Although physicists and engineers can anticipate what might happen based on what they know, the machine is a machine, sometimes reliable, sometimes not. What they don't know, what the machine isn't built for, is what they can't handle. Here's the big thrill element. Can we beat the odds, can we go where no collider has gone before?

Who Decides?

Should we take a chance? Point that 27 km collider at Geneva? Half power or full power? It's not really CERN's decision. It's not even CERN's collider or CERN's money. Paid for by taxpayers. Owned by taxpayers. There are 2 million of them a stone's throw from ATLAS. No one in Geneva was asked if they wanted this collider in their backyard. Why not put the question to these good people? Let them decide. Isn't that fair?

Talk to the people about Spooky Quantum Effects that will come as a complete surprise. Probability zero of course. Tell them CERN has decided on the unknown, that all LHC risks are ZERO. What a relief. Thanks CERN PR.

LHC ReReStart In Progress

Watch any of 20 LHC Live Status Pages from this link.

The LHC is being prepared for injection energies of 0.45 TeV per beam. Once beams are injected into the 27 km ring, then they can be ramped up to higher energies quickly, as high as 3.5 TeV per beam this year and collisions could follow soon at a maximum of 7 TeV in any of the detectors.

Another little glitch on LHC1 (click above) "problem on the PCs of the triplet--access needed--No beam before 8 h tomorrow"

There really isn't any word from CERN on a schedule, not on their websites or even from CERN on Twitter. You can see why. But still what is CERN going to do? Jump quickly, go slow, play bunker ping-pong? Spooky.

From The CERN X Files

Finally this update from CERN physicist Lucio Rossi, confirming several crucial LHC machine safety issues in the fault-prone superconducting magnet systems that failed in 2008. His review of the 2008 accident is discussed in Nature News, Feb 23, 2010, "Did design flaws doom the LHC?":

Catastrophic failure that caused accelerator shutdown was not a freak accident, says project physicist.

Rossi's paper appears in IOP, "Superconductivity: its role, its success and its setbacks in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN".

Rossi concludes in part:

"The incident also revealed a lack of adequate risk analysis (maximum MCI) [Maximum Credible Incident] and of understanding all consequences, as well as an incomplete global magnet circuit protection analysis and an inadequate detection of a dangerous situation. . . ."

You'll find a less academic account of busbar bugaboos in my "LHC Beams Back To Life".

Finally, if CERN were infallible they wouldn't need a $10 Billion collider to find out what they don't know. I don't remember Einstein ordering a collider. His research budget was a few logs on the fire, the "lazy dog" according to Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein's professors.

This is Part 4 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Part3: Higgs Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider / More Delays

--Alan Gillis

Hawking Partly Wrong

NewsHammer Exclusive Peter Higgs with CERN's Tejinder Virdee and get-this: Under the hood of the giant solenoid CMS 12,500 tonne detector behind them you've got a radiator leaking water like a '72 Chevy. The new and mighty CMS, our favorite experiment, one of 4 beautiful cathedral-size detectors or reactors, but CERN won't call them that, has 272 zones of corrosion. Plus unlike any Chevy anywhere it even leaks its coolant directly into the engine. But that was December, a cold month, about 25 gallons or a 100 liters of water with the CMS plugged in, CMS On, spilling inside. See the candid report in the CMS Times, "CMS Winter Shutdown Adventure".

Don't worry, none of the 1,000,000 signal channels were affected. CERN didn't really say one way or the other, but not saying exactly anything at CERN always means there are no safety issues. Damage of course was minor. I suppose we are being asked to theorize a quick wipedown by CERN technicians insured a total recovery of all systems, even unaffected systems that might have been at risk. Though how did the technicians get inside? It took them 10.5 days to break in, a bit late for a quick wipedown. Though with a lot of official CERN hot air always present at the LHC, it could have been easily diverted directly into CMS. The blow-dry operation would be the intervention of choice for the "incident", as CERN hot air is considered very hot in comparison to other smaller collider PR.

CMS is maybe still down for 272 corrosion repairs due to other leaks, spotted once technicians got inside for the quick wipedown. A second burst pipe and flooding of the CMS Control Room two years running has been fixed again. 4,000 fault-prone connectors mistakenly installed in a new giant safety system, to replace an old system that failed in 2008, the nQPS or new Quench Protection System, have been replaced. That's why in part, the collider hasn't been going anywhere over the very long and bumpy "Technical Stop" since December in case you were wondering what happened to $10 Billion and 10,000 physicists trying to hitch a ride on the LHC Eurostar.

That's the latest from CERN, a fast train as an equivalent to an LHC beam. Not the power of 1700 Nuclear Power Plants, as discussed in "Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected". By the way, the Two Mosquitoes Line, a long-running embarrassment bewildering even for collider kids, was shutdown and deleted from all CERN websites in a surprising retreat from CERN hot air physics. Looks like the CERN-EuroDisney merger is at a "Technical Stop".


Leaky CMS/ First Quantum Bench Test

Results not in.

Anyway, why leaks, especially water leaks in a new CMS that cost a fortune to build? The CMS gets very hot when it powers down. At its ordinary field strength of 3.8 Tesla it operates at about 18,000 Amps. It's supposed to power down gradually, but sometimes it can crash, like when there's a power failure. Then it can get hot enough to smoke.

During a crashdown test a couple of years ago, you could see a cloud of steam rising in a series of CERN photos which used to be available from CMS. That in itself could have damaged water lines and caused the later big spill and corrosion.

Other though unplanned "incidents" might have contributed:

Monday [August 3, 2009] at 2:19 PM, when a power cut on the CERN general network caused a slow discharge that turned into a fast dump a few seconds later. Investigations are ongoing to understand the switching from the preferred slow discharge to the faster dump which, while being a throughly tested part of the CMS operations, raises the temperature of the coil to 70K, thus requiring three days to cool down again to 4K before current can be injected again.

"5am 9 Nov [2009]: “Glitch” in CMS solenoid cryogenics system caused magnet to ramp down to 2.3T."

"[as of December 7, 2009] CERN power outage Tuesday night . . . trip of tracker cooling plant. . . . 3 or 4 cases . . . CMS solenoid magnet cryo dry compressors stopped. Field dropped from 3.8 T to 3.5 T. . . . slow current dump of CMS solenoid. Went down to 2.7 T. . . . Down most of today due to another power glitch"

Mounting Radiation Hazards In Cooling Water

Not that everything has been going smoothly. A lot of water is used as coolant at the LHC, including for some Septum Magnets that suffered heavy radiation damage and had to be replaced in 2004, "SEPTUM MAGNET MNP-23 FOR THE CERN PS EXPERIMENTAL AREA
AND ITS FAST INTERLOCK SYSTEM". With the recent revelations about mounting radiation hazards during collider operations, ignored for 10-15 years in ring tunnels according to Steve Meyers Head of Accelerators, in "Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday", it looks like some people in CERN Maintenance were well aware of the potential problems. Doesn't anybody at CERN read CERN docs?

That also means mounting radiation hazards in many LHC cooling water systems, including the colossal CMS solenoid surprisingly also partly cooled by water, and leaking too. Hope there's a new study and some action on this, before radioactive waste water finds itself in nearby Lake Geneva.

The LHC Collimator System where relatively exposed beams are focused is also cooled by water in part, though like in the CMS system it's hard to imagine an idea like this being approved by a CERN Committee of Experts. Here's the full January report from Chamonix, "Summary of the Collimation Upgrade Plans" and the smoking gun slide on P38.

Perhaps it's time for a little more foresight.

LHC On Target Again For Re-ReStart

Late January, February, Mid-February, March, February 20th (Official), February 25 (Rumor), After Monday but no firm date (Official, sometime after Monday February 22)

Jump to 3.5 TeV, no back to injection energy 0.45 TeV. Slow ramp? Not perfectly clear yet. A good idea I'd say. One of those 3.5 TeV beams will be very hard to handle if the collider has another bad day.

Next in NewsHammer, more on CMS in The Strange Case Of The Misbehaving Magnet At The LHC

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 3 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Exclusive After a brief and successful restart this November, the Large Hadron Collider is on standby until March for more fixes and re-commissioning to higher energies. It's an uncharacteristic and surprising move by CERN, four years behind schedule and billions over budget on the $10 Billion collider, but a welcome go-slow approach to machine safety.

In September 2008 days after start-up a $40 Million accident crippled the LHC for over a year. Until the surprise winter break, CERN's objectives were for 3.5 TeV beams by the end of 2009 instead of the 1.18 TeV beams achieved, though with a bonus of some test collisions at a record 2.36 TeV.

Data highlights of CMS collisions have just been released in an article on MIT News. The big surprises were high numbers of mesons produced, and those numbers increased faster with collision energies, not predicted by models based on lower energy collisions at other colliders. CMS will publish its formal paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Why Stop There? 2.36 TeV instead of 7 TeV

The abrupt end to commissioning in December at higher energies also surprised CERNies on site besides fans of the LHC. It wasn't because of the usual winter shutdown over the holidays. Safety concerns won over speed. Going to higher TeV meant jumping over another threshold in magnet powering, above 2,000 Amps. With so many magnets damaged last time during the 2008 busbar accident, Steve Meyers, CERN's #1 collider guy, decided to go slow again. Anyway the leaky CMS experiment and the faulty nQPS, the new Quench Protection System for the thousands of magnets, were also having trouble big time.

2010-2011 LHC Run 18-24 Months at 3.5 TeV per Beam

After a rethink last week at Chamonix, the collider's favorite ski resort, CERN has decided on going slower still. After current repairs and retrofits that should be completed by mid-February, now pushed ahead to March (don't ask) the LHC will aim for 3.5 TeV beams and 7 TeV collisions or 7 Tera or 7 Trillion Electron Volts, over the next 18 to 24 months, shutting down for lengthy major safety retrofits for possibly a year. Then in 2013 commissioning to 7 TeV per beam and 14 TeV collisions. Alarmingly sensible. Collider safety taking precedence? Congratulations, CERN.

Though potentially more dangerous heavy lead ion collisions, are now off the back burner and might start this Fall.

Unforeseen Radiation and $235 Million to $Billions More In Upgrades

More surprises at Chamonix. The end of January 5 day event, largely a study of safety at 5 TeV per beam, current LHC status of safety upgrades, and future safety upgrades, was more of the usual data avalanche. Here comes the check for the big holiday blowout.

Including new amazing unforeseen radiation hazards that will develop as the collider runs (Session 6--Radiation to Electronics) to deficiencies in the pre-accelerators (Session 8) including Electron Cloud trouble, and aging equipment and a need for higher energy injection beams with more bunches per beam or Billions More Dollars in upgrades. Maybe 100 Million Swiss Francs in civil engineering to move huge power supplies away from radiation zones, unknown but substantial costs to shield and/or redesign and replace equipment prone to radiation damage. Maybe at a minimum 1.3 or 1.4 Billion SF to upgrade pre-accelerators, probably much more if aging systems need full replacement. And more major upgrades to ventilation equipment including more ventilation shafts that were alarmingly inadequate for the 6 ton spill of Helium in 2008.

Here's the schedule and presentation abstracts including links to CERN docs and slides, "LHC Performance Workshop - Chamonix 2010". A "Summary of the ....", the webcast of February 5 and now a 2 part video from CERN, covers the main points made at Chamonix. Here's the abstract of the video, including links to docs cited and slides shown.

An important but informal end comment from the DG, Dr Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the new Director General of CERN since January 2009, didn't make it to video.

After Steve Meyers overview of radiation hazards developing and damaging equipment, to answer the big unspoken question hanging in the air, Meyers said:

"I think a declaration 10 or 15 years ago that the underground service areas in the LHC were non-radiation areas."

After Meyer's conclusions, Dr Heuer, sitting in his seat up front summed up his thoughts this way to the CERN audience:

"Instead of making decisions every 3 months, I prefer to have enough time to think it over."

A radical change from last year's we're good to go to 5 TeV per beam and gradual installation of more safety systems over the next 5 years. The estimate back in July for safety after $40 M in repairs was a whopping $235 Million extra in "LHC Status by Steve Meyers..." CERN video, still ignored by the media for safety the collider should have had before the accident of 2008. No CERN press release, that must be it. The new faster CERN schedule on safety upgrades will still mean spending the $235 M, while $1 to $2 Billion more on other upgrades thanks to the Chamonix review is now being considered. Hard to recall the LHC is a new collider.

One thing CERN forgot was the $1 Gazillion for Computer Systems Security including SCADA and Ethernet-Connected Instrumentation Systems. Why wait for the Trojans to attack?

All Ahead Slow: New Physics In Sight

If the LHC Machine is being re-engineered for more safety, it's the same old anything goes as to what the LHC might produce in terms of New Physics. Exciting not to know where physics is going, but hardly something to brag about. An army of the best minds in HEP don't have a clue? We're going to the Moon, but we might wind up on Mars or Venus or maybe we don't have enough thrust to go anywhere?

We've all read about it over and over again. Wow, the LHC is on the brink of answering the biggest questions in the Universe. Great. Where can I buy one? Or more realistically the LHC is an experiment with the unknown, with unknown consequences, with little in the way of safety studies and risk assessments.

As with design and engineering before the accident, CERN is still relying on its own considerable expertise in what will happen at the LHC with its experiments. It's what CERN doesn't do with all that expertise that raises some red flags on safety like not studying all the risk scenarios and not performing slow and difficult computer modeling of collider objects the LHC might produce and what they would do at the LHC.

CERN isn't worried, so why should we be? Well, CERN wasn't worried before the big accident CERN still calls "the incident". Accidents preventable, incidents happen. Now poised to go to extremely high energy collisions of 7 TeV as early as this March and ultimately to 14 TeV, the LHC may create objects like micro black holes that might threaten the planet.

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 1 of a report on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected