LHC portal

I found out about the Rubber Ducks in the ATLAS control room seen via the live video stream.

http://lhcportal.com/Forum/viewtopic.ph ... 49&start=0

Im going to need to retire this thread soon... Its been a good one.

I will put up a new one for reporting, commenting on the current events..

It will go into the Collider forum with a date on it..

Nice work finding out about the ducks !

Did you ever find out if they did higher power collisions ?

I guess right now there's little point in that other than to set a record as the scientific value would be limited until they've confirmed all the experiments are calibrated well.

I think they are pondering this...

I would imagine a press conference is coming on all these events..

I have not kept up with press event schedules..

Reposting here; this was actually my response to the same discussion in "Several biggest errors of particle physicists"

AFAIK LHC have circulated beams at 1.18 TeV but done no collisions at that energy yet. Last weekend's collisions were at 450 GeV according to what I saw in logs etc. Of course I missed the event so I may be wrong here...

But... It makes no sense to me to do a lot of calibration and beam stability studies at 450 GeV (which seems to have been what happened last week) and then go for collisions at an energy level higher than what was tested before. If I were to commission a machine like this I'd get confident at 450 first and do collisions at that level so as to give the experiments (ATLAS, CMS, etc.) a chance to test their equipment. Then, I'd repeat the process at a higher energy level (possibly with some shortcuts -- if appropriate).

There are more parameters that are important than the energy, by the way, one of them is Luminosity, another Intensity. Could it be that there is some confusion about that?

Also...
1 GeV = 1 x 10^9 eV (or in shorthand 1e9)
1 TeV = 1 x 10^12 eV (or 1e12)
1.48e10 = 1.48x10^10 = 14.8 x 10^9 ... don't believe for a second those are eV because it would mean collisions at an underwhelming 14.8 GeV

I completely agree there's no scientific reason to go for higher power collisions just yet, but there might be a temptation to do it in order to 'tick the box' and get it over and done with.

I prefer them to take it slowly, but there's some advantages to do it without early warnings. I know I would have probably been nervous if they announced the first collisions, so it was a nice surprise when I found out collisions were already made and nothing bad happened.

yes completly operator error on my part...

However..

Higher energy tuning starts shortly according to the commissioning schedule.

My guess is next weekend might be interesting..

... and I'm looking forward to it. Go, LHC go!