eLearning Collaborative

This afternoon, the high school students got to go to another part of CERN and go inside of the actual tunnel! It was awesome. The LHC is 27 km in circumference and about 100 meters underground. We got to walk about 100 meters length down the tunnel. Instrumentation on the pipes that surround the beam of protons that will be going through the tunnel is to measure the quality of the beam. There are 6000 amps of current running through the superconducting magnet at the particular area we were in. The purpose of the magnets is to steer the beam through the tunnel. Another section that we got to see was the "dump" section where the beam is distributed safely in the case of a security sensor being set off. A person going down into the tunnel cannot be near the magnets, there is radiation and a possible problem would be a leak in the healium lines (cooling). The proton beam is moving at close to the speed of light and if there were a safety breech, then the collision would have the energy of a 747 going at high speed, so the dump spreads energy of the beam so it can be released through a series of absorbers. The beam would drill a hole through these absorbers if it were not spread out in the case of an accident.

This link shows the area that we were in... (section 2): http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000570

The following pictures are of the OPAL experiment, a detector that was in the LEP multipurpose collider, which started in 1989 and ended in 2000. It measured the results of interations between electrons and positrons that collided at the center of the detector. The electrons and positrons approached eachother from opposite directions along the beam pipe.

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