LHC Creating a "Mini-Big Bang"

Unstung

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The Large Hadron Collider will smash ions together this time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11687912
BBC said:
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.

Since 2009, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator has been smashing together protons, in a bid to shed light on the fundamental nature of matter.

But now the huge machine will be colliding lead ions instead.

The experiments are planned for early November and will run for four weeks.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border and is managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern).

The collider consists of four different experiments and one of them, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions.

The goal of these collisions is to investigate what the infant Universe looked like. Colliding protons at high energies was aimed at other aspects of physics, such as finding the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.

Cern's spokesman James Gillies told BBC News that besides ALICE, the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments will also be temporarily colliding ions.

Big Bang

He said the tests could provide an insight into the conditions of the Universe some 13.7 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.

They will look at the Universe fractions of a second after a tiny but very dense ball of energy exploded to create the cosmos as we know it today.

Scientists believe that it was back then that a special state of matter existed, different from the matter the Universe is formed of now.

"Matter exists in various states: you can take a material like water and if you deep freeze it, it'll be solid, and if you put it on a table, it'll turn into a liquid, and if you put it into a kettle, it'll turn into a gas," said Dr Gillies.

"It's all the same stuff, but those are different states of matter. And if you take materials into laboratories, you can pull the electrons off the atoms and you have another state of matter which is called plasma."

But at the very beginning of the Universe, there might have been yet another state of matter. Physicists have dubbed this "stuff" the quark-gluon plasma.

"And this is the state of matter you have if you're able to effectively melt the nuclear matter that makes up atoms today, releasing the things that are inside, which are quarks and gluons," Dr Gillies explained.

Quark and gluon soup

If the researchers at the LHC are able to recreate that state of matter and study it, they could get important clues about how it "evolved into the kind of matter that can make up you and me".

One of the scientists who will be taking a part in the experiment is David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK.

"Although the tiny fireballs will only exist for a fleeting moment (less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) the temperatures will reach over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun," said Dr Evans.

"At the temperatures generated, even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of the atoms, will melt, resulting in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons."

The researcher said that the temperatures and densities that the collider will aim to create will be the highest ever produced in an experiment.
 

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black_hole_eating_the_earth.gif
 

Turbinator

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I would love to see a proper animation of how a planetary body would be absorbed by a black hole, spontaneously originating on the surface of that body.
 

T.Neo

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Indeed... if the black hole was actually able to gain in mass and ingest sizable amounts of matter, there would likely be a brilliant x-ray lightshow as matter falls into the black hole... but I haven't a clue of how it would actually behave.
 

Linguofreak

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I would love to see a proper animation of how a planetary body would be absorbed by a black hole, spontaneously originating on the surface of that body.

Thing is, nothing the LHC would have a chance of creating would be big enough to absorb matter faster than it lost mass due to hawking radiation.
 

Turbinator

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Thing is, nothing the LHC would have a chance of creating would be big enough to absorb matter faster than it lost mass due to hawking radiation.

I would love to know what kind, if any, damage this might do to the LHC.
It would kind of be very cool if we could say in our time, that a BLACK HOLE caused damage to anything even remotely human related.
 

Linguofreak

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I would love to know what kind, if any, damage this might do to the LHC.
It would kind of be very cool if we could say in our time, that a BLACK HOLE caused damage to anything even remotely human related.

The energy released by a mini black hole radiating away would be no more than the collision energy involved in creating the hole plus the mass of the colliding particles. Therefore, it could do no more damage than any other collision at the accelerator.
 

jedidia

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What if they create a new universe inside ours that pushes ours out of existence?

If my memory serves me right, Haldemann needed a several hundred thousand kilometers long particle accelerator which was built by nanomachines in a jupiter orbit to make that scenario a threat, and even there it would have been a "localised" phenomenon, blowing not much more out of the universe than the solar system (Haldemann, Forever Peace).
 

Keatah

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Thing is, nothing the LHC would have a chance of creating would be big enough to absorb matter faster than it lost mass due to hawking radiation.

How can we be certain of that? The LHC was built to explore new realms of high-energy physics. And if it does not explore them, then it is a worse waste of money than the space station.

The LHC is going to probe at higher and higher energies. If our theories are wrong or 'out-of-spec' then we might be asking for trouble. We might make something that can't be contained; blackhole or not!?!:uhh: We just don't know.

Anyways everyone should see THE VOID.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289605/
The portrayal of the physics lab getting sucked up is pretty decent and the effects are about what you'd visualize in your mind's eye. Just get past the cheesy corporate espionage/university junk story and you're in for a sucking good time! Its a great show! Grade B-, but passable! And quite scary too. The lab being ripped apart and sucked up is real fun!

http://www.exitmundi.nl/blackholes_lab.htm
http://www.exitmundi.nl/blackhole.htm
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000408.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/archives/000060.html

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOW-NYPEp84&feature=related"]YouTube - Proof that Black Holes Exist[/ame]
 
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Urwumpe

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I would love to know what kind, if any, damage this might do to the LHC.

If a magnet fails at full power, the emergency beam dump would have the effect of a nuclear 500 kg bomb at the beam dumps - or where ever the beam leaves the magnetic ring accidentally.

Otherwise, there is really nothing, that the LHC can do, that nature didn't do to us already in much bigger scales and magnitudes. Cosmic radiation reaches a few million times stronger collisions than the LHC can ever do.

The biggest measured cosmic ray was a proton with 20 million times the peak energy of the LHC. The energy was equivalent to a fast thrown baseball - in a single hadron. And it was measured on a detector on the surface of Earth. In the past 15 years, we had 150,000 particles raining on the tiny detectors, that had been stronger than the LHC.

The question is not, what unknown realms of physics the LHC can reach and what dangers can wait there, but more what happens when such collisions happen in nature. We can't have a cathedral sized detector everywhere.
 

Wishbone

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The only real physics related scare in the past hundred years was before the Trinity test, when there were fears that the atmosphere would catch chain reaction. It doesn't mean that our experiments are foolproof, though. Yet the LHC is pretty small on the scale of energy release, so nothing to fear here.
 

Artlav

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Anyways everyone should see THE VOID.
So that's the name of that movie i always thought about when they talk LHC black hole, but never could find a slightest trace of anywhere.
 

jedidia

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The energy was equivalent to a fast thrown baseball - in a single hadron.

Imagine your riddled doctor when you come to him and claim that you have received a concussion out of nowhere if that thing hit you in the head! :lol:
 

Urwumpe

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Imagine your riddled doctor when you come to him and claim that you have received a concussion out of nowhere if that thing hit you in the head! :lol:

Why do I now have this image of Charlie Brown in my head... :lol:
 

Moach

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Thing is, nothing the LHC would have a chance of creating would be big enough to absorb matter faster than it lost mass due to hawking radiation.

well, it does create quite a heavy media frenzy... perhaps THAT could be big enough :lol:


man, people sure love their doomsday stories... wasn't the world supposed to be vaccumed to oblivion by that thing several months ago?

i wonder what they'll come up with next.... 2012 is probably gonna be quite frustrating - just like y2k was...:facepalm:



...hmm... and we're 10 years past the supposed end-of-the-world-by-spontaneous-earth-explosion-day... :shifty: uh.. let me check... nope, no doom... :shrug: i guess that one was off also :cheers:
 

Izack

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i wonder what they'll come up with next.... 2012 is probably gonna be quite frustrating - just like y2k was...:facepalm:
Nonsense! I'm looking forward to 2012 and the massive doom-related drop in property tax. :rofl:
 
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