LinuxPlanet Casts

Media from the Linux Moguls

Archive for the ‘Large Hadron Collider’ Category

Higgs Bosons & Tough Materials | SciByte 25

without comments

post thumbnail

We take a look at the breaking news on Higgs Bosons, materials tougher than diamonds, inserting objects in pictures become more realistic, Hubble research hits a milestone, dinosaurs, talking parrots, down-loadable knowledge, information on the unbelievable Lunar eclipse we just had, a quick spacecraft update and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Download | Ogg Download

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | Ogg Feed | iTunes Feed

Show Notes:

Support the Show:

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Price: $59.95

( customer reviews)

3 used & new available from $59.95

Higgs-Boson confirmation just around the corner?

Tougher than diamond?

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Tricking the eye in photographs

Scientific papers from Hubble hit a milestone

The North American “terrible (large) lizard”

Polly want an explanation for how parrots talk

  • The low down
  • Parrots have neither lips nor teeth, but that doesn’t stop them from producing dead-on imitations of human speech
  • Significance
  • Part of the reason is that, like humans, parrots use their tongues to form sounds
  • Scientists took x-ray movies of monk parakeets
  • Parrots use their mobile, muscular tongues to explore their environment and manipulate food
  • Those capable organs also help parrots utter greetings in words that even humans can understand.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : X-ray movie of a vocalizing monk parakeet
  • Social Media
  • Twitter Results for [#]()
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • How Parrots Talk @ ScienceMag.org](http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/scienceshot-how-parrots-talk.html?ref=hp)

Learning by the Matrix/Chuck way

  • The low down
  • Pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas
  • The brain then fills in greater detail
  • New research in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort
  • Significance
  • Researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks
  • Think of a person watching a computer screen and have brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease
  • This research is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance
  • None of these studies directly addressed the question of whether early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning
  • * Of Note*
  • The approached worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning
  • The decoded neurofeedback method might be used for various types of learning, including memory, motor and rehabilitation
  • On the flip side the neurofeedback mechanism could just as soon be used for purposes of hypnosis or covert mind control
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Learning high-performance tasks with no conscious effort may soon be possible (w/ video) @ Midical Xpress
  • Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain, Matrix-Style @ PopSci
  • Scientists say they’re getting closer to Matrix-style instant learning @io9

Lunar eclipse, with a twist

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

DAWN Spacecraft reachest closts orbit to the asteroid Vesta

  • Vesta:
  • Discovered: March 29, 1807 by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers of Germany (fourth asteroid discovered)
  • Dimensions: About 578 by 560 by 458 kilometers (359 by 348 by 285 miles)
  • Shape: Nearly spheroid, with a massive chunk out of the south pole
  • Rotation: Once every 5 hours, 20 minutes
  • About the length of Arizona, it appears to have a surface of basaltic rock – frozen lava – which oozed out of the asteroid’s presumably hot interior shortly after its formation 4.5 billion years ago, and has remained largely intact ever since.
  • DAWN:
  • Launch Date : Sep 27, 2007
  • Mission will go through through July 2015
  • Framing Camera (FC) : Scientific imaging system of the Dawn Mission to the two complementary protoplanets, 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta.
  • Visible & Infrared Spectrometer (VIR) : Accomplishes the Dawn mission’s scientific and measurement objectives of producing spectral images. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft successfully maneuvered into its closest orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta today
  • Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (GRaND) : Measures elemental abundances on the surface of Vesta and Ceres.
  • Gravity Science : The team utilizes the radio link used for communications and carefully observe the Doppler shift in the link’s carrier frequency (when received at ground stations) due to
    gravitational forces acting on the spacecraft center-of-mass in the environment of Vesta and Ceres.
  • Multimedia
  • DAWN Media Gallery @ NASA
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA DAWN website
  • NASA DAWN website

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • Dec 15 1612 – 399 years ago – A telescope meets the Andromedo galaxy : [Simon Marius](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Marius, namer of Jupiter’s 4 inner satellites, is first to observe Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, but not the closest galaxy overall. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote a tantalizing line about it in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964, describing it as a “small cloud”.
  • **Dec 14 1807 – 204 years ago – Meteorite gets scienced ** : In Weston, (now called Easton) Connecticut at 6:30 am, a meteorite was seen with an aparent size of 2/3 the size of the moon. Eyewitnesses reported three loud explosions, as it fell and broke apart to fall in at least six locations. This meteor became the first to fall in the New World to be documented, collected, and chemically analyzed and received much attention in the national and international press. The largest and only unbroken specimen weighing in at 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms) was recovered and made a hole 5 ft long and 4.5 ft wide (1.5 m long and 1.4 m wide) now resides within the oldest collection of meteorites in the United States. Out of the approximately 350 pounds of the meteorite that fell on the town of Weston, less than 50 pounds can now be accounted for. Yale Peabody Museum – Weston Meteorite
  • **Dec 17 1903 – 108 years ago – The Wright brother fly ** : In 1903, the first powered flight was achieved by the [Wright brothers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights in the Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. That morning, the biting cold wind had a velocity of 22 to 27 miles an hour. As ten o’clock arrived, the Wrights decided, nevertheless, to get the machine out and attempt a flight. Orville Wright launched from a track, taking off into the wind. The aircraft covered 120 feet, aloft for 12 seconds. Thus for the first time, a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started. First flight photo

Looking up this week

  • You might have seen …
  • On Dec. 8th, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed an unusual event on the sun: An erupting cloud of plasma was eclipsed by a dark magnetic filament. VIDEO By studying how the light of the explosion is filtered by the foreground material, SDO mission scientists might be able to learn something new about dark filaments on the sun.
  • Keep an eye out for …>
  • Wed, Dec 14 : Orion is up in the east-southeast after dinnertime, and higher in the southeast later in the evening. IMAGE
  • Thurs, Dec 15 : The Moon has a bright companion as it rises late this evening: Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the lion, sits to it’s upper left.
  • Fri, Dec 16 : Mars is close to the upper left of the Moon as they climb into view after midnight, and looks like a bright star.
  • Sat, Dec 17 : Last-quarter moon. Above it around midnight is Mars
  • More on whats in the sky this week
  • Sky&Telescope
  • AstronomyNow<
  • SpaceWeather.com
  • HeavensAbove
  • StarDate.org

Written by chris

December 14th, 2011 at 12:48 am

Posted in 3-D geometry,Alamosaurus,Alamosaurus sanjuanensis,allotropes,download knowledge,Featured,Higgs-Boson,Hubble,Hubble Space Telescope,Large Hadron Collider,LHC,Linux,Lunar Eclipse,SciByte,selenehelion,Selenelion,talking parrots,Video

Large Hadron Collider | SciByte 8

without comments

post thumbnail

This week on SciByte …
We take a look at Large Hadron Collider, what it is, what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. Plus we take a peek at science behind the curtain of the Universe at some the smallest elements and more basic interactions that makes everything we know and see tick.

All that and more, on SciByte!

Direct Download Links:

HD Video | Large Video | Mobile Video | MP3 Audio | YouTube
SciByte iTunes Feeds: SciByte RSS Feeds:
HD Video
iPad & Apple TV Video
iPod Video
MP3 Audio		 HD Video RSS
Large Video RSS
Mobile Video RSS
MP3 Audio RSS

Show Notes:

Disclaimer!

Some of today’s episode will talk a little about particle physics, what we will cover is going to be a more broad spectrum quick look. Just giving enough of a glance at it so that looking at the research going on at the LHC will mean a little bit more. Feel free to research these topics more on your own or request that we go into it a bit more on a future SciByte and as always we’ll tell you more about how to do that at the end of the episode.

What IS The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a nutshell?
  • It is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
  • It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature.
What does that mean and how does it do it?
  • What kind of particles are the experiments at the LHC looking at?
  • How does the LHC accelerate particles to produce the collisions that the experiments look at?
  • What are the components, dangers and basics of the LHC?
  • To get a better idea of what all of this actually means we’ll start by taking a quick look at the basic elements of the universe and what forces cause them and everything in the universe to interact.
We’ll start with The Standard Model Theory

Everything in the Universe is found to be made from basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces.

What are those Four Fundamental Interactions of Nature ?
  • From the strongest to the weakest … Strong, Electromagnetic, Weak, Gravity
  • Strong Nuclear Force – Strong force carrier are gluons, they acts on quarks and act as the glue to hold them together to create neutrons and protons and the residual force holds nucleus together. About 100x stronger than the electromagnetic force, but the range is limited to about the size of a proton.
  • Electromagnetism – Electromagnetic force carrier is a photon and acts on charged particles and is responsible for propagation of light, and gives a magnet the ability to pick up a paperclip
  • Weak – Exchange particles of weak are the ‘w’ ‘z’ bozon and and explains the energy production of the sun and radioactive beta decay
  • Gravity – Assumed that since the other three forces have force carriers gravity does to, called the graviton. Gravitational force is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass. [ If the graviton does exists, it must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) ]
That poses an interesting thought …
  • If electrons had a different mass, then electromagnetic field would be a different size, and therefore all matter would be a different size.
What are those ‘basic components’ of the Universe?
  • Some of these were mentioned talking about the fundamental interactions
  • Start off looking at the elements VIDEO
  • All ~118 elements were made of Electrons, Protons and Neutrons VIDEO
  • Beginning of the 20th century we found many other particles from cosmic rays, energetic charged subatomic particles, originating from outer space VIDEO
  • They started to organize these particles by : spin, charge, mass, and lifetime (how long till they decay into simpler particles) VIDEO
  • To simplify this picture, quarks were predicted VIDEO
  • Six quarks were predicted, then discovered; bringing confidence to the model
  • Boils down to basically Quarks, Bosons and Leptons [Electrons, Muons, Tau]
So what ARE Quarks ?
  • They are elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter that you can’t see directly, they and they have some unusual properties,
  • They make up and are permanently trapped inside other particles like neutrons and protons.
  • Six types / flavors that come in pairs [Up/Down ; Charm/Strange ; Top/Bottom] : only UP/DOWN are stable and make up all ‘normal’ matter
  • You can’t bring them out individually to study them, only be found within hadrons
Hadron … like in Large Hadron Collider? … what are they?
  • Things made up of Quarks (including protons, neutrons) and are composite particle that scientist call Hadrons. There are many theorized types of Hadrons but most exist only very briefly.
  • The best known Hadrons are protons and neutrons and excludes leptons and photons
  • Made of Quarks and held together by the strong nuclear force (while atoms and molecules are held together by the electromagnetic force) and categorized into two families
    • Baryon [ made of 3 quarks ]
    • Mesons [ one quark and anti-quark ]
Do these exotic particles exist anywhere outside of physics experiments?
  • They existed right after the Big Bang, and occur in cosmic-ray events when they strike atomic nuclei in the earth’s atmosphere, these rare particles can be produced.
The problem with the Standard model …
  • It does not explain everything.
  • Gravity is not fully explained in the Standard Model, instead it predicts (but we have not observed) the Higgs-Boson
So what is the Higgs-Boson Theory ?
  • Predicted for ~40 years
  • Permeates all of space acting like sticky bits that put a drag on other particles
  • Interact with all particle except for photon, graviton, and gluons
    • gravitons – undiscovered/theoretical force carriers for gravity
  • To detect a Higgs Boson in a lab; we must create a real one. We do this firing particles and anti-particle together, out of the collision can look for decay products that would indicate Higgs-Boson
Collisions? … that brings us to the Large Hadron Collider
Large Hadron Collider
  • Looking beyond the Standard Model (dark matter, extra dimensions, … ) VIDEO
  • What Hadron’s are used? : mostly lead ions (lead atoms stripped of electrons)
  • Underground, below the border of Switzerland and France
The Large Hadron Collider – Basic Stats
  • Circumference : ~ 17mi / 27 km
  • Diameter : ~ 5mi / 8km
  • Depth : roughly the height of a 42 story office building [ 175 m / 574 feet ]
  • Magnets : 9300 throughout the facility
  • Power : 120 MW [~roughly 5000 avg American homes] [ ~all the homes in Canton, Geneva]
  • Cryogenics : ⅛ of the total system would qualify as the worlds largest refrigerator
  • Operates at temperatures [1.9 K] even lower than outer space! [2.7 K]
  • Temperatures Generated : more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun [when two beams of protons collide, concentrated within a minuscule space]
  • Pressure : 10 times less than the pressure on the surface of the Moon [internal pressure of the LHC is 10-13 atm]
Why Underground?
  • Cheaper to excavate a tunnel than to acquire the land to build on the surface, impact on landscape is reduced to a minimum. It also had to be at least 5m below the top ‘molasse’ green sandstone stratum
  • The moons tidal variations have to be taken into account then beams are injected into the collider
  • Between new Moon and full Moon the Earths crust rises by slightly more than the width of notebook paper [9.8in/25cm] in Geneva, causes a variation of diameter of a pinhead [1mm] in the circumference of the LHC
  • The Earth’s crust also provides good shielding for radiation.
LHC is not a perfect circle
  • made of 8 arcs and 8 straight intersections
  • Each arc contain 154 dipole ‘bending’ magnets
  • Each Intersection consists of a long straight section
LHC Vacuum
  • Insulation vacuum for the Cryomagnets
  • Insulation vacuum for the Helium distribution line
  • Beam Vacuum is kept at about 10x lower than on the Moon to avoid collisions with gas molecules
LHC Magnets
  • Total of about 9600 magnets
  • Contains about 10000 t of iron, that’s more iron than in the Eiffel Tower
  • LHC Dipole magnets are superconducting electromagnets, use niobium-titanium cables
  • dipole VIDEO : 1232; quadrupole VIDEO : 392; sextupole; octupoles; decapoles
  • Magnet Coils are wound from cable made up of 36 twisted 0.6in/15mm strands, each strand is made up of 6000-9000 filaments. These filaments can have diameters 10 x thinner than a normal human hair [as small as 7 micrometers]
  • Total strands for the LHC would circle the Earth 6x at the equator [270,000km]
  • Total Filaments, if unravelled, would stretch to the Sun and back 6x, with leftover for about 150 trips to the moon
The Large Hadron Collider() ( L.H.C ) Acceleration Video
  • Hydrogen atoms are fed into a linear accelerator at a precise rate.
  • The Hydrogen electrons are stripped off leaving hydrogen nuclei, protons in a strong magnetic field which accelerates the protons to 1/3 the speed of light
    • low pressure hydrogen in a sealed container with a couple of electrodes in it, then apply a high enough voltage difference betweeen the electrodes the hydrogen becomes ionised. This means the electrons are stripped away from the hydrogen atoms leaving bare protons. This is what happens in fluorescent lights.
  • Protons now enter a booster section, where it’s divided into 4 rings 0.6% of the LHC [515feet/157m] in circumference and accelerated with a pulsating electric field and kept bent with a magnetic field. The booster accelerates the protons to 91.6% the speed of light and squeezes them together
  • The 4 packets are re-combined and passed into the Proton Synchrotron, which is [4x larger than the booster/2% of the LHC] in circumference [2060feet/628m] which they travel in 1.2 seconds [99.9% speed of light] Now additional energy can’t add velocity, it instead manifests as increased mass, which translates to 25 times the resting mass of the protons
  • Now channeled into the Super Proton Synchrotron which is about [11x larger than the Proton Synchrotron/25% of the LHC] in circumference [7km/22965ft] and adds additional energy to the protons. Readying them to enter the Large Hadron Collider
  • LHC ( 27km / 88582 feet in circumference). It houses two vacuum pipes for protons traveling in opposite directions The opposing beans cross in four detector caverns where they can collide
  • The LHC adds extra energy from pulsed electric fields to the protons which now travel around the 27km/88582feet 11,000 times per second. The protons are now 7000 times heavier than they were at rest. Steering magnets bring them to collide
LHC Data
  • 150 million sensors deliver data 40 mill times per second, filtered to about 100 collisions of interest per second
  • Sampling Rate Capacity: sample / record the results of up to 600 million proton collisions per second
  • Data from all four experiments : 700 MB/s, ~= 15,000,000 GB / year (15 PB)
  • Data Recorded by each of the big experiments at the LHC will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVDs every year
  • Data from all 4 experiments would will a stack of CD’s 12.4mi/20km tall
Before we get to the LHC Energies involved, what units are involved and what to they mean?
  • TeV – teraelectronvolt : The amount of kinetic energy gained by a single unbound electron when it accelerates through an electric potential difference of one volt
  • 1 TeV = 1.602×10^-7 J = 0.0000001602 J
  • Watt is a J/sec [W = J/s] & conversely a Joule is a Watt*sec [ J = Ws ]
A TeV EXAMPLE : How long would a TeV light a a 60Watt bulb ?
  • 1TeV = [ 1.602x10^-7 J ] = [ 60W ] * [sec]
  • [ 1.602x10^-7 J ] / [ 60W ] = [sec]
  • 2.67 nano seconds = 0.00000000268 seconds`
LHC Energies
  • Each proton flying around the LHC has 7 TeV, which has the energy to light a 60W bulb for 18.69 nano seconds [0.00000001869 seconds]
  • When you clap your hands, you probably do a ‘collision’ at an energy higher than that, but much less concentrated.
  • 1 TeV is about the energy of a flying mosquito, the LHC is extraordinary for the ability to squeeze that energy into a space a million million times smaller
  • Total energy in each beam at max speed [350 MJ] is about the same as a 400 ton train travelling at 93 mi/h [150 km/h]
Is the LHC Dangerous?
  • Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet.com
  • Cosmic Rays have been bombarding the Earth, moon, Jupiter, Sun, … since our formation with no known affect, and in much larger numbers than the LHC will produce
  • Mini Big-Bangs? : at the very small scale, the energy concentration does represent the energy density just moments after the Big Bang; the TOTAL energy is produced by these collisions is still very low
  • LHC Black Hole? : Black holes are created by collapsing massive stars which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy. Any microscopic black holes created by the LHC would be so microscopic that they could not interact with surrounding matter. In addition theories suggest that microscopic black holes would only exist for a few fleeting moments before they would evaporate and disappear.
  • Radiation : Studies have shown that radioactivity released in the air contributes to an dose to the public such that 10 years of ‘exposure’ gives about the same as 1 round trip from Europe to Los Angeles produces and is 240 times less per year than an average year in Switzerland.
It’s a particle accelerator … but what does that mean?
  • A particle accelerator is a device that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams.
LHC Beams
  • Might circulate for 10 hours, travelling the distance to get to Neptune and back again
  • Protons at full energy travel at 0.999999991 times the speed of light, and circles the 16.8mi / 27km ring 11,245 every second
  • Only 2 nanograms of Hydrogen are accelerated / day … at that rate it would take ~ 1 million years to accelerate 1 gram of Hydrogen
Is it like smashing an apple and an orange together and getting bananas?
  • Not really, it’s more like getting a whole bunch of apple and orange pieces, and also chips of banana and antibanana, grapes…
How does the LHC see particles?
  • For each collision, scientists count, track particles
  • If the detector is in magnetic field, the charge of a particle will be which way it bends, and the momentum ( mass x velocity ) can be determined based on the path of travel [high momentum particles travel in almost straight lines while low momentum particles make tight spirals]
– Main LHC Detectors –
ALICE – A Large Ion Collider Experiment
  • Produces ~100Mb/s during proton-proton run; 1/25 GM/s during heavy-ion run of data
  • Specializes in analysing lead-ion collisions
  • Studies properties of quark-gluon plasma [when quarks and gluons are no longer confined in hadrons/Lead-ions] Quark-gluon plasma probably existed just after the Big Bang
ATLAS – AToroidal LHC ApparatuS
  • Produces about 320 MB/s of data
  • General-purpose detector designed to cover the widest range of physics possible
  • The largest-volume collider-detector ever constructed
  • Searches for everything from the Higgs boson to supersymmetry and extra dimensions
    Consists of 8 25-m long superconducting magnet coils
CMS – Compact Muon Solenoid
  • Produces about 300 MB/s of data
  • General-purpose detector like ATLAS, but with different tech and design
  • Built around a huge superconducting solenoid
  • Can generate a magnetic field about 100,000 times that of the Earth
LHCb – Large Hadron Collider beauty
  • Produces about 50 MB/s of data
  • Studies asymmetry between matter and anti-matter
  • Uses a series of sub-detectors to detect mainly forward particles
– Additional LHC Detectors –
LHCf – Large Hadron Collider forward
  • Small experiment to measure particles produced close to the direction of the beams in proton-proton collisions
  • Testing models used to estimate energy of ultra high energy cosmic rays
TOTEM – TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement
  • Measure effective size / cross section of proton
  • Detects particles produced close to the LHC beams
Additional Information
Social Media

Written by chris

July 20th, 2011 at 2:26 pm

Posted in ALICE,ATLAS,CMS,Compact Muon Solenoid,Featured,Hadron,Higgs-Boson,Large Hadron Collider,Large Hadron Collider beauty,Large Hadron Collider forward,LHCb,LHCf,Linux,Quarks,SciByte,TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement,TOTEM,Video