About the LHC at CERN

Anyone have any clue about what's happening with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? I do remember that the project ran into some initial glitches when they started it. Donno if/when they recovered from that. Have they managed to find the Higgs Boson?

They're currently in the process of adding safety systems to prevent a repeat of the problems from first time around. It's due to be back up and running in September.

Steve.

they have published their new startup schedule. http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR02.09E.html

it will likely take several years for them to be able to say they have seen the higgs (supposing it really is there to be found).

there is a lot of stuff to read on the cern website (they invented the web, so they should be good at it)

The delay with the LHC has made it a pretty exciting time. The LHC usually doesn't run in the winter because the energy costs are much higher, but if they shut down it may allow the Tevatron to beat them to the prize. See the 20 February entry on Bob Park's site.

Can the Tevatron really gather enough data and do the analysis to confirm the higgs with any reasonable level of certainty before the LHC goes online. I would have thought not unless they are very lucky with the energy, thou this is only my guess really.

Any Tevatron users out there, to comment or enlighten me?

Anyway surely the discovery of super symmetric particles or other stuff that's on the LHC cards would be at least as valuable as the higgs.

Possibly this is a media spin. They do love a race, just look at the lessons from the human genome saga. Either way I am sure the 50:50 suggestion does wonders for the Tevatron funding. But maybe I am just being a cynical bugger.

My understanding (though I'll admit that I am not a high-energy guy) is that the answer to that depends on the mass of the Higgs, which isn't exactly known with any certainty needless to say. Also, it's less of a question of whether they will know before the LHC starts up again and more of whether they will be able to find something and publish 1st - a few months isn't all that much of a head start in the grand scheme of things, especially since the LHC is a more capable device.

Of course, since we are talking about rather far-out science here, I'd be willing to bet that just about anyone working at those places would be forced to concede that it is a giant roll of the dice. Whee!

I don't think it is media spin; this is a real race if the Higgs is detectable within the range of the Tevatron. I think the fact that the LHC deciding to run all winter shows that. Also, one of the justifications for building the LHC was to detect the Higgs.

The Higgs has been such a big deal for so long, that I am sure a Nobel will be awarded if it is ever detected. The tangible benefits from the race, apart from the two or three people who would be awarded the Nobel, are not much more than bragging rights for the thousands of people involved. But as a physicist, it is highly motivating to be able to be part of such an important experiment. It is one thing to take a lot of data and build up models that describe what you see, but here there is the Standard Model, which has shown itself to be such an excellent model, and this model says that this particle exists and it has such-and-such energy. To be able to go out and verify a model prediction is very exciting.

This is very similar to Einstein's general theory where it was an odd and hard to understand theory, but it was able to describe some unusual things like the precession of Mercury's orbit. But it also said predicted that grazing-incidence starlight to the Sun should be bent by so-and-so arcseconds, and Eddington and others went out and found that to be true.