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San Francisco, 9:50 PM
Thu Dec 31
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/11/09
A CERN bulletin dated December 14 (that's in the future!) talks about the awesome progress the LHC is making on its way to achieve its planned 3.5 TeV per beam.
[cdsweb.cern.ch]
1 eV = 1 electron-volt is the energy that an electron would receive if you were to accelerate it through a potential difference of 1 volt.
1 TeV = 1 tera eV = 10^12 eV = 1 000 000 000 000 electron-volts.
To put that energy in perspective, 1 TeV is enough energy to create about 1000 protons at once.
The LHC is designed to achieve 3.5 TeV per beam, that is, 7.0 TeV when the two proton beams collide.
So, to grasp what this means, this is like throwing 2 protons against one another with enough energy to produce 7000 more protons.
(It doesn't actually happen that way, though. The proton-proton collision produces a lot of other stuff, rather than 7000 protons)
Another way to grasp how awesomely powerful 7 TeV is, consider the fact that *all* chemical reactions (that is, all of chemistry and all of the biochemistry of life) take place at an energy level of a few tens of electron-volts per reaction, that is, about 100 billion times smaller than what the LHC produces in a single collision.
#tips #LHC #CERN #madscience #physics
Black Holes Could Be Brewing Under Switzerland by Late 2009
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A Supermagnetic Tunnel Full of Subatomic Action
Proton Collisions Right Around the Corner