CERN has announced that it’s going to boost the beam energy of the Large Hadron Collider by 0.5 TeV this year in a bid to pull more data out of the micro-universe before the machine takes a break at the end of the year. The CERN management says running the LHC at 4 TeV per beam will help it meet a data target of 15 inverse …

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Monday 13th February 2012 23:27 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Where's da Higgs at, yo?

> "full design power of 7 TeV per beam in 2015"

Sadly not. CERN seems to have settled for a maxout at 6.5 TeV for safety reasons. They don't want to risk blowing the interconnects, if I understand correctly.

More at:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4425

And in particular, the summary of the Chamonix technical meeting [Not averse to skiing, are we?], here:

https://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?sessionId=8&resId=1&materialId=1&confId=164089

"DO NOT GO FOR 7TeV PER BEAM DUE TO THE RISK ASSOCIATED WITH MANY HUNDREDS (THOUSAND) QUENCHES - Around 6.5TeV/beam is safer and sufficient"

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 00:30 GMT jake

As in ...

"They couldn't hit the broadside of a barn at this dist ..."

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1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 01:50 GMT Steve Knox
  
  What I was going to say!
  
  "In other words, how many barns are your particles going to hit?"
  
  In more appropriate terms, what are the odds that your particles could hit a barn, i.e, broad side thereof?
  
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2. Tuesday 14th February 2012 02:01 GMT Graham Marsden
  
  @jake
  
  If you're referring to the alleged famous last words of General John Sedgewick, the unit of measurement you require is the elephant...
  
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  1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 02:14 GMT jake
    
    Thank you, Mister Marsden. I know.
    
    But we were discussing femtobarns, and there is an expression ... ah, hell. If you have to explain it, it's not quite as funny.
    
    On the other hand, you live in a nanny state which has removed weaponry from the peons, so perhaps you've never heard the expression.
    
    On the gripping hand, I vaguely remember "sheds" and "outhouses" being bandied about when I was working on the computers at SLAC.
    
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3. Tuesday 14th February 2012 08:56 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
  
  "They couldn't hit the broadside of a barn at this dist ..."
  
  Here we modified that to:
  
  "They couldn't hit a barn if they were standing inside it."
  
  With a femtobarn, this would create difficulties of course.
  
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Tuesday 14th February 2012 04:40 GMT Paul Hovnanian

Meh.

Call me when they crank it up to eleven.

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 04:41 GMT Winkypop

But we need to know

Does the big red dial go all the way to 11?

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 06:56 GMT Anonymous Coward

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_relations)#Techniques

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

cheap eastern labour. dead-end carrier path.

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 07:00 GMT Fred Flintstone

She's gonna blow! She cannat taake it any langer!

"in my experience, all the world's best engineers have been Scottish"

RIP, James Doogan

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 07:47 GMT TeeCee

Femtobarns?

Now I have a mental image of all the boffins sat at their desks playing femtofarmville on incredibly tiny portable devices.

Thanks.....

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 07:58 GMT Anonymous Coward

Are femtobarns

used to house octohorses (a la Sleipner)?

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1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 09:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Yes, I got it
  
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Tuesday 14th February 2012 08:30 GMT James 63

"More power Igor!"

I really hope there actually is a wall of big old fashioned breaker switches, and they have a hunchbacked dwarf to pull them whilst cackling maniacally.

It won't really just be a person (not even in a white coat) tippy-tapping on a keyboard.

And they wonder why the lay-person can't connect with science...

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1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 08:52 GMT Blofeld's Cat
  
  Now Igor, while the storm is at its height!
  
  Not forgetting the essential Jacob's ladder and the large wheels that can be cranked maniacally when required.
  
  Computers may be efficient, but they just don't have the visual appeal of a brain in a tank.
  
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  1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 12:52 GMT Christoph
    
    And Blinkenlights
    
    We must have Blinkenlights!
    
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    1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 13:51 GMT Martin
      
      Actually, in the original 1931 Frankenstein...
      
      ...the assistant was actually called Fritz. And in Bride of Frankenstein, he was Karl, apparently - played by the same actor. (Even though the Monster killed Fritz in the first one...)
      
      Don't know when Igor became the norm...
      
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Tuesday 14th February 2012 08:56 GMT Chuckl

Dilithium crystals, we need some dilithium crystals

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 08:58 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson

But the question we ask ourselves

How many femtobarns in a nano-wales?

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1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 10:10 GMT Justicesays
  
  2.78*10^44 Femtobarns in a nanowales
  
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Tuesday 14th February 2012 09:34 GMT Silverburn

Hmm.

I remember a load of stories before Xmas about how they'd almost found Higgs and it was only a matter of time.

Now they're cranking up the juice...does this press release come under the "errr, oops. Nothing here afterall. Maybe we better keep looking" heading?

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1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 10:33 GMT FartingHippo
  
  Yeah!
  
  Plus that whole 'breaking the speed of light' thing. All gone suspiciously quiet there. I reckon they've knocked up a time machine and are making a mint on the horses.
  
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  1. Tuesday 14th February 2012 11:07 GMT Audrey S. Thackeray
    
    Well they will have had to have been going to have paid for all this somehow.
    
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2. Tuesday 14th February 2012 12:36 GMT DanDanDan
  
  Well...
  
  The increased energy is not the same as an increase in luminosity (measured in inverse femtobarns).
  
  There's essentially two factors under control: Luminosity (or the NUMBER of particles in a beam) and Energy (or the "speed" at which they're travelling).
  
  A la E=mc^2, only particles whose mass is lower than the Energy/c^2 can be created (mass-energy conservation). Increasing the energy opens up the mass range of the particles you can hope to observe.
  
  Increasing the luminosity increases the number of collisions and therefore increases your hope of catching a rare event (like the Higgs Boson being generated). Now, they've already created a number of events which look like a Higgs, but they *could* be something else. I'm simplifying, but the idea is to generate more Higgs Bosons so that you're 99.9999% sure that it wasn't just something that looks like a Higgs. At the minute, they're *only* 99.95% sure that they've seen it, so they want a few more events to be sure.
  
  Increasing the Energy gives us a higher chance of seeing something we're not expecting. We already know that the current theories will break down at a certain energy, so by upping the energy enough, *eventually* we'll make a massive breakthrough. Worth some tax pennies in my opinion.
  
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Tuesday 14th February 2012 11:19 GMT Anonymous Coward

If they have

They willen haven been winnened, and wollen be maken hay.

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Tuesday 14th February 2012 17:41 GMT Mike Powers

"running the LHC at 4 TeV per beam will help it meet a data target of 15 inverse femtobarns for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, with LHC bunch spacing to remain at 50 nanoseconds."

But what about the plasma phase inducers? Or the inertial damping field? Or the dilithium polarity reversers?

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Wednesday 15th February 2012 07:53 GMT mcav

"Boffin" makes your article unworthy

Regardless of the content of your article here, it is marred by the fact that your use of the word "boffin" continues to reinforce a socially constructed stereotype of the scientist as a person who is an outgrouper from society that should be viewed with ridicule and contempt.

How banal your reference is, is irrelevant. It is just a reinforcement of a stereotype that needs to go away.

Unless you are trying to campaign to "take back boffin", don't use it.

Might I suggest a t-shirt? "Boffins do it better"? or "Boffins save the world!"... or similar.

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1. Wednesday 15th February 2012 08:42 GMT jake
  
  I really don't understand this "anti Boffin" stance.
  
  I have t-shirts that reference boffin. My coffee cup reads "Boffin at Large" on one side, and has a large familiar blue oval trademark on the other. Most of my race cars have had a 22"X10" stencil that reads "DANGER! Boffins at work!" for the last thirty years. I tried to get the CA State license plate "BOFFIN", but somebody already bagged it ... See:
  
  http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/886907
  
  And I'm a bloody yank!
  
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2. Wednesday 15th February 2012 22:06 GMT geemoney
  
  Re: "Boffin" makes your article unworthy
  
  You must be new here...
  
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Friday 17th February 2012 05:52 GMT Anonymous Coward

Boffins indeed

Rather suspicious, as recounted here:

http://iheardacouplethings.blogspot.com/2012/02/cern-boosts-their-beams.html

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