Explosives Update

I’m still in those upside-down parts, and my very unreasonable wife rarely lets me spend the $25(!) required to use the hotel wifi connection, so am utterly out of the loop and of no use to man nor beast.  But, I have now managed to grab some scraps of internets and was catching up on some emails when I saw this one from a friend:  

So, a chap here left his coat on the train. He rang up and reported it and was told that they had indeed found his coat. However, it is now in a bomb-proof container, located in Bristol. They cannot remove it from said container and return it to him, lest it explodes, unless he goes to pick it up in person. Bombers of late being noted for not wanting to blow themselves up, it's presumed that if he turns up in person it can't be a bomb. I see no flaws in this logic.

Indeed.  Carry on with the good work there boys. 

I'm off

Right, I'm sat in the Virgin clubhouse lounge-thing at Heathrow and I'm markedly less than entirely sober.  I'm off to Oz for the rest of the month, so posting will very likely be intermitant and holiday-based.  

Do try to get along without me.

The LHC Part 2 - Technical Stuff

I’m off to Oz tomorrow, and as they’re likely to fire it up whilst I’m away, I thought it best to fire out another LHC- post.

Last time I gave a run-through of the concepts and science involved with that there hadron smasher, but now I’m going to talk about some of the engineering involved (which is much more in my comfort zone) and the issues encountered which have postponed doomsday until a few weeks’ time.  I’ve purloined some material from work to illustrate.  Special thanks to Dr Bruce Kennedy -who works on CMS here at RAL- for the material. 

Here’s a video to get us started:

Quick recap: What’re we doing at the LHC again?
Well, historically we have been seeing the form and nature of atoms using instruments such as electron microscopes.  If we wish to see inside atoms and their component parts, we need to resolve much higher energies than that kind of equipment can provide. For example, here is a proton:

If we wanted to resolve the structure of this proton we need to use a beam with energy of at least 1 GeV (eV=electron volt: a unit of energy which is also a unit of mass in particle physics, confusingly). Unfortunately this is enough energy to smash the proton to pieces.   So the best we can do is commence with the smashing, and look at those pieces and determine the make-up of the proton from that.

How do we do that? Well first off, we need to create some protons. At the very start of the LHC process there is an ion source which produces H+ ions  (which are your standard hydrogen atoms with the electron stripped away, leaving you with a proton).    Because protons have an electrical charge,  they can be  accelerated and directed by applied electric fields.

The protons are injected into the Linac (LINear ACcelerator), where they are accelerated using 129 pulsed quadrupole magnets. These magnets bunch the protons together, focussing and accelerating them in a straight line towards the first of several synchrotrons.  A synchrotron is a circular arrangement of magnets and RF cavities which accelerates particles round and around until they reach a certain energy, at which point they are generally kicked out for some other purpose, or they can, like the electron-based machine at DIAMOND (next door to me at RAL), just keep the particles spinning over and over to produce light energy for their experiments. Alternatively we can go the LHC route and just smash beams together and see what happens.

Where were we? Ah yes, we’ve just been fired out of the Linac.  Now the first synchrotron the protons encounter after they leave the Linac is the Proton Synchrotron Booster, into which they are injected with energies of 50MeV.   Here they are accelerated further until they reach energies of 1.4GeV, at which point they are fed into the Proton Synchrotron(PS) which accelerates the protons further still until they reach  25GeV. Can you guess what happens next?  Yes, they get fed into yet another synchrotron called, imaginatively enough, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

Now the SPS on it’s own is pretty massive, coming in at 7km around (compared to the ISIS synchrotron which is about 163m in circumference), and it is the base for several existing science programs like COMPASS and CNGS.  The SPS spins our long-suffering protons up to 450 GeV, before sending them on their merry way into the LHC tunnels.

This is the fun part.  Every other ‘bunch’ of protons is sent in the opposite direction to the last, around the parallel rings of the LHC.  As I mentioned last time, they are sped up to within a tiny fraction of the relativistic speed of light before being steered into each other’s path.  The energy of each beam is set ultimately to be 7TeV, meaning a cumulative energy of 14 TeV when they collide (although they are going to start at a much more modest 1TeV and work up from there).  The collisions are created amidst large detector arrays, like ATLAS:

I will attempt to embed a flash animation now to illustrate the whole thing. No-one move or breathe (right clicking and zooming might be useful):

So what went wrong when they tried to switch it on last October?

Well the the ring of the LHC itself consists mainly of a chain of magnets –which in turn are broken into two basic types: dipoles for steering and quadrupoles for accelerating.  Together the LHC’s magnets store considerably more energy than the beam itself;  about 10,000 megajoules compared to 362 megajoules for the beams. Most of this energy is contained in 1232 superconducting dipole magnets. ‘Superconducting’ means they have been cooled down to the point where electrical resistance in the magnet coils is effectively zero, allowing for the currents needed to produce the massive magnetic fields we’re looking for.  And by cold we mean 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F).

So they were testing the powering of some dipoles in sector 3-4 last September, and they encountered a bit of a problem.  Well actually it was a lot of a problem.  The system suffered a Quench, which is where a magnet is inadvertently heated beyond a critical point, changing it from superconducting to just, well, conducting.  This change releases the stored energy of the magnet and that of the neighbouring magnets too.  Which can have rather dramatic effects.

In this case the quench was caused by an electrical short,  meaning that a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC switched off the main compressors of the cryogenics for the two sectors of the machine, compromising the integrity of the cryogenic system (this sector was one of the last to be done – managers take note: keep an eye on your subbies towards the end of a project when the pressure’s on to finish ASAP).  The consequences were pretty severe:

The fault caused a circuit to overload, causing an arc which knackered a helium vessel.  The helium then leaked into the vacuum jacket surrounding the chain of magnets, causing a massive overpressure.  Ultimately, 24 dipoles and 5 quadrupoles were ripped out of their fixtures and thrown several feet down beam. the floor was smashed and 6 tonnes of helium was vented into the tunnels.   It was what is known in the trade as: borked.    But don’t take my word for it:

  

That wrote off the whole facility for a year.

So now, after a massive amount of repair work and several extra tiers of system integrity failsafe installation; they’re ready to go again.  In fact they’re already running the beam up in preparation:

 

They might not know it, but this will be this generation’s moon-landing.  It might seem arcane, unknowable and downright confusing, but this will be -in all likelihood- an epoch-making event in human understanding.    So whilst everything else might well be grim, be glad you were there when another couple of pieces of the jigsaw were put in place.

Bribing away poverty

Guess I spoke too soon on the interesting news front:

You might remember Michael Laws, the Kiwi mayor I’ve previously mentioned when he –rather refreshingly- insulted some some school kids.  Well he’s being contentious again:

"That there is a group within our society who give their children no hope nor opportunity from the moment that they are born,"

"That these ‘parents’ are known to authorities ... and yet the authorities can only intervene after children have been harmed."

Mr Laws goes on to write: "it would be far better for this appalling underclass to be offered financial inducements not to have children, given the toxic environment that they would provide for any child in their care."

Right, so his logic goes: These people can’t/won’t look after their kids, so lets pay them to be voluntarily sterilised so that the problem never presents itself.  He argues that even paying parents $10,000, for example, would be a net gain on the public coffers and cause a large reduction in child abuse-related incidents (which New Zealand has a disproportionately high number of).

I’m somewhat sympathetic to his argument, I mean I would sooner pay people to not have kids than pay them to have them, and I imagine so would a fair proportion of you; especially after walking down the high street of any given town during working hours and seeing the phalanxes of pram-pushing teenagers and rat-boys hanging around Greggs.

But there are –shockingly enough- sceptics:

But his "solution'' has been branded "draconian'' and "totalitarian'' by the country's child health advocates who are calling for him to stand down as a city mayor.
"I just find it such a disgraceful attitude,'' Child Poverty Action Group director Janfrie Wakim said.

Indeed, how are you supposed to run a Child Poverty Action Group with no Children in Poverty? The bastard.  And ‘Draconian’ and ‘Totalitarian’ imply compulsion, and I don’t think he was suggesting Nazi-style mass sterilisation programs.  That said, as we’ve seen in the past, with many government schemes: the transition between voluntary and compulsory can be a swift one once you’ve acquired popular support.

So go on then, it’s Friday afternoon and I’m not talking to myself: what do you lot reckon?

Stifling Indifference

As there is not much going on that I care enough to write about, here is a selection of awesome trawled from the sewage outflow pipe of the intertubes.

Perspective: Cell Size and Scale

Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation. Yes, really.

A proper Hole in One. Still doesn't make golf worth watching, though.

This guy has a fucking leopard hanging out of his car window.

And finally, following on from my last Lamebook comment:

I swear to god, if I could create a keyboard which would punish idiots with pain.....

Not the Spoon!

10 minutes of brilliance  found via b3ta.

The horror is unrelenting.

Well that cheered me right up

On the back of suggestions that our troughers-in-chief were likely to have the publicly-funded rug pulled from beneath them, I read this most uplifting article by Andrew Gimson in the Torygraph:

Actually, I’m going to go and read it again, back in a tick……

Yep, it was just as good second time ‘round:

"It's a ----ing disgrace", one MP elected in 2005 said of this proposal, which leaves him uncertain of his own position, for while the train journey to his constituency takes under an hour, the time rises to over an hour if he adds the taxi journey to his house.

Oh dear, oh dear.  That sounds perilously close to the irritations suffered by the average working tax-payer, except for the taxi part- most people probably couldn’t afford that every day, so would probably have to take a bus to the station.  Oh my, imagine having to do that.

The same MP was outraged that his wife will be prevented from working for him and accused Sir Christopher of placating the mob by proposing such harsh restrictions.

Well it wouldn’t be an issue if you and your kind weren't relentlessly spending the “mob’s” hard earned on your pointless clan in order to increase your household’s overall take, and so that Tarquin needn’t get a real job during the summer holidays.

Many MPs claim that mean-spirited reporting of their expenses is destroying democracy. The crisis has produced a sense of victimhood which stretches across the House: one Labour MP spoke with deep sympathy of the way in which a Tory MP whose expenses have attracted wide publicity is now a pitifully diminished figure, his years of meritorious service counting for nothing compared to the manner in which he has enriched himself at taxpayers expense.

Take away lesson here: don’t enrich yourself at the taxpayers expense. And how the hell is it destroying democracy?  The pay is still far better than average, and they’ll pay your rent and travel if you’re not local.  If anything the reduced income will hopefully dissuade the typical troughing politico wannabe in favour of  men and women who actually wish to do the job.

Westminster is full of disappointed men and women who have made enormous efforts to get into Parliament, only to find themselves condemned on being elected to lives of almost total insignificance.

Surely the job is what you make it? If you’re sucking the party teat in the hope of some scraps from the table rather than doing and saying what is best for the bods who put you there, then maybe you deserve obscurity.  Look at Doug Carswell: arguably insignificant from the mainstream party point of view, but between him and DanHan they make enough racket to put half the party to shame.

For these disappointed MPs, the news that they can expect to lose many thousands of pounds in allowances comes as an especially bitter blow: the final sign that an ungrateful nation does not appreciate their spirit of self-sacrifice and that even such consolation prizes as a second home purchased at public expense are now to be snatched from them.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Self-sacrf.. AHAHAHAHAHAAAAA! Stop it you’re killing me!

The Palace of Westminster feels a bit like Versailles just before the French Revolution. To walk round Westminster is to mingle with a political class which still cannot see why it is regarded by the public as remote, greedy and over-privileged.

The analogy is flawed by the much lamented absence of Madame Guillotine to  focus the minds of these modern day bourgeoisie as to their predicament and the frame of mind of those noisy peasants outside.

But if the new rules are irresistible, many MPs would at least like slower trains to their constituencies so that they will not be forced to share the wretched lives of ordinary commuters. One wonders whether the railway system will ever recover.

Oh my good lord: MPs forced to travel in the same manner they’re so keen for the rest of us to adopt; this will be interesting.  Wonder how keen on green they’ll be after spending the morning commute pressed against the armpit of an overweight, hung-over brickie? 

Of course none of this might happen, and they may well give the old ‘rules’ a lick of paint and return to thieving as usual,  but I’m enjoying the moment.