As LHC Draws Nigh, Nobelists Outline Dreams--And Nightmares [News]
The number 14 turns up conspicuously in discussions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the soon-to-be world's biggest particle accelerator. Construction of its underground, 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on a site near Geneva, Switzerland, has taken 14 years. It is designed to reach energies of 14 tera- (trillion) electron volts (TeV), or about seven times that of the Tevatron, the world's currently reigning accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.And project leaders at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced today that next month workers should be done chilling the machine's 50,000 tons of magnets to temperatures colder than deep space—a bracing –456.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 kelvins)—making them ready to whip opposing beams of protons to near light speed and collide them so researchers can pick over the debris. [More]