I thought it best to write a post now, as I won’t have a chance to during this Tuesday’s excitement — not because I’ll be so wrapped up in first 7 TeV collisions, but because it’s going to be the first day of Passover, which will take me partially offline. (Who exactly thought that this would be a good day for the big event? Well, it had to be on some day or another.) Just like last time, I plan on sleeping through the big event, as I thoroughly expect it to be uneventful.
For instance, don’t expect any radically new science to emerge from the first days of collisions. While it appears that the experiments are really in excellent shape, based on the work done with the December collisions, it will take a long time to accumulate and analyze enough data before we can definitively say that we have observed any new physics. The amount of data we expect to take in these next two years is enough to make the LHC experiments competitive in discovering new phenomena, or constraining what new phenomena might look like, but that’s still two years worth of data. So, as the old saying goes, this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we have to pace ourselves.
But on the other hand, everyone is motivated to get out some kind of result as soon as possible, to demonstrate that the experiments do work and that we’ve got what it takes to complete the marathon. The major milestone is the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which starts on July 22. By then, everyone is hoping to have a bunch of real physics results (even if they are merely confirmation of known phenomena rather than discoveries) that can set the baseline for the performance of the experiments. July 22 is sixteen weeks from this Thursday. To go from having no data at all to high-quality measurements in sixteen weeks is going to be quite a feat. Put on top of that the uncertainty of just how well the LHC will perform over this time — by ICHEP, we definitely expect to have a million times as much data as we recorded in December. But it could turn out to be be ten million times as much! Whether any particular measurement is feasible or not could depend on which end of that range we end up on, and there might be many course corrections to make as we go along as a result.
So even though the real LHC physics program is a marathon, on your marks, get set….
KB
Tags: first collisions, first results, ICHEP, marathon, sprint
Just a quick question. I have been looking at the status page recently and watching as the beams have been brought in and out and at the various problems that have been displayed. The main page (LHC1) shows the 2 beams and generally they are at different intensity levels. When they collide will both beams be at exactly the same level or is this impossible to do that precisely? Thank you again for the insight into the goings on at CERN
Regards Mark
Yes, very well put. A marathon to be run as a sprint! I’m sure that all the physicists on LHC experiments are super-human and will deliver beyond what people outside will expect, so I find all this exciting – even if there is almost no prospect for new physics this year.
Concerning Passover: I am reminded over and over again of the Christian-centric views of European planning. It still surprises me how much the CERN schedule is attuned to Christian holidays and ignores major holidays of other major world religions. I recall hearing a senior physicist giving a major address in a collaboration meeting joke about how no one would think to be working a few days before Christmas, and then seeing the stony faces of muslim colleagues. This year, it seems rather artless for CERN to place a big media event on Passover, and then declare a holiday for Easter a couple of days later…
Michael — glad that you think that everyone is so super-human, especially considering that you are directing one of the sprints! I’ve sort of gotten used to Jewish holidays getting trampled on (especially now that I live in Nebraska), but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. (Although I really liked CERN being closed for Easter Monday — not much email yesterday!) It could be pointed out in response that if we were attentive to all major world holidays, it wouldn’t leave us with too many working days. There, another argument for why everyone should be Jewish….
Mark — I’d expect that the beams would be at the same intensity levels quite rarely, and it’s not a prerequisite for things working. The most important thing is that the beams have the same energy (at least, that’s important if we want to model what’s going on properly). At Fermilab, where protons and antiprotons are collided, the proton beam is as a rule much more intense, because it’s so hard to make antiprotons.