This weekend the weather has been playing tricks on me in New York. I intended to go camping upstate with some friends, but after a valiant attempt on Friday evening/Saturday morning, we decided to take our soggy sleeping bags and head back to Long Island. It literally rained all day, night and the next morning – which being from Colorado – I’ll never get used to. I decided to share this with you on a Sunday afternoon sitting in my apartment looking out my window at this:
A room with a view
The gods must be conspiring against me to make sure I get work done this weekend 
. So I thought I’d update everyone as to the status of the LHC. My email’s been a buzz with information. So far all the repairs have been completed and the entire ring is back at the operating temperature of 1.9 K. The schedule is still on to start circulating beams in mid November with low energy collisions soon to follow. Although we probably won’t be at the full energy this year, any collisions would be an amazing milestone.
There’s also a new LHC First physics Physics Website that you will probably want to check out. It will have the most up-to-date information. Happy reading on a beautiful Sunday!
Tags: schedule, student life
A very good weekend, oh
The presentations held at the CERN Machine Advisory Committee – 1st Meeting give all the public available info. They believe there is a chance for first high energy collisions before christmas. Magnet retraining seems to be a major issue for the future >10TeV.
Hi Regina. I discovered the LHC blogs a few weeks ago, and have really enjoyed reading them. You mentioned low energy collisions in this blog entry. I remember reading somewhere that an experiment was planned at the LHC which would use low energy collisions to attempt to verify once and for all that antimatter falls downward in gravitational fields. Do you know whether such an experiment is actually in the works?
Too bad about your camping trip. The weather here (in Colorado) isn’t much better, we’re currently having heavy snowfall.
Hi Brad,
Glad to hear you’re enjoying the blogs! As to your other question about antimatter… I don’t know of any experiment like that that’s taking place at the LHC. I found, however, information about an experiment at CERN called ATHENA (AnTHydrogEN Apparatus). (see: http://athena.web.cern.ch/athena/) This experiment researches all kinds of things about antimatter (and anti-Hydrogen specifically).
That got me thinking about antimatter in general. I have to say, I’ve never heard of a theory where antimatter would react oppositely in a gravitational field (in interactions with matter or other antimatter). Mesons, for example, are particles that are quark/antiquark pairs. It seems like if antiparticles reacted differently, then we would have seen it in naturally occurring pions, or cosmic rays which produces muons and “anti-muons”. Also in terms of CPT symmetry (under this transformation, we get antimatter from matter), we don’t see any involvement with the gravitational force.
Honestly, though I’m not an expert in this area so if you still have some questions let me know and I can ask around.
And this to Lac Leman – they have been historically optimistic about milestones at CERN regarding the LHC. Maybe as an old grad student, I tend to be a little bit more reserved in my optimism. I hope for high energy collisions this year, and it would be great if they happened but I don’t expect them.
Thanks very much for the link to the ATHENA experiment. I think that’s exactly the experiment I need to be looking at. And as an amateur, I very much appreciated hearing the thoughts of a professional on the matter. Even with your disclaimer that you aren’t an expert, you make some good points about mesons, pions, etc. This idea that antimatter might rise in a gravitational field was speculated upon by Morrison and Gold in the 1950′s, although they never presented a proper theory, as far as I know. But it has caught my imagination even if mainstream physics has pretty much left the idea behind.