/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6026078]

>>505880028

On /b/ but I'll ask the same question here

If the LHC takes the fast moving particles in the large loop and channel them back into a small loop, would they accelerate faster/travel at even higher velocity?Any sciencefags here that could deduce this concept?

[Anonymous No.6026108]

miracles

[Anonymous No.6026149]

CERNfag here. The small loops work as pre-accelerators for the big loop, i.e the LHC. The particles pass through all of the loops in succession, and each one accelerates them to a higher energy. This energy is limited essentially by the radius of curvature of the loop (which is why you keep needing bigger accelerators) and the strength of the magnets used to bend the beam.

If you were to funnel the particles back from the LHC into a smaller loop after accelerating them to the maximum LHC energy, the magnets in the smaller loop would not be strong enough to keep them in orbit. They would crash into the wall of the accelerator and the beam would be lost.

If you were to funnel them back from the LHC into a smaller loop without accelerating them past the maximum energy of the smaller loop, you'd be fine. The beam would not be lost.

[Anonymous No.6026176]

A large hardon collider is a scientific apparatus consisting of a watermelon at least 18" in length, with holes cut in the ends.

Small hardons will not collide.

[Anonymous No.6026279]

>>6026149

Makes sense. So if it was possible to in effect, create a smaller loop with slightly more powerful magnets than the big loop, and send the particles in, in theory, could the particles reach higher speed around the center, if not for a very small amount of time? This could lead to higher energy collisions.

I visualized taking a tennis ball attached to a string through a tube, getting a spin on the tennis ball, but then pull the string from the back of the tube, the tennis ball would in effect speed up. A way of getting particles to travel faster without building a larger loop

[Anonymous No.6026324]

INB4 the physical constant of light cannot be surpassed

[Anonymous No.6026331]

>>6026279
No.

A smaller loop is no better at accelerating particles than a large one. In fact, it's worse, because the tighter curve means more force to overcome for a given distance. If you can make significantly more powerful magnets (say, 10 times as powerful) you should upgrade the LHC with them, as it will allow for higher-energy tests. Without inventing significantly more powerful magnets, the only way to perform higher-energy tests is to increase the radius of the circle, thus lowering the amount of force needed to overcome for a given distance, and allowing a higher maximum speed. There are already plans for the collider above LHC, which will both be even bigger and have even more powerful magnets.

[Anonymous No.6026333]

>>6026331
Yes, the SSC.

Should be coming on line any day now...

[Anonymous No.6026334]

>>6026279

The image used here is both inaccurate and irrelevant to this discussion.

It is inaccurate because the ball does not travel faster, it travels at the same rate, but completes an orbit in a smaller amount of time because the orbit is smaller.

It is irrelevant to this discussion because these collision tests are concerned with the energy (speed) of the particles, not the amount of time it takes for them to complete an orbit.

[Anonymous No.6026337]

>>6026078
I have a better question.

Why haven't we built a particle accelerator in space using solar powered sattelites?

[Anonymous No.6026340]

>>6026337

I have an even better question, why don't we build a particle accelerator that completes a loop around the circumference of the earth

[Anonymous No.6026367]

>>6026337
Because 1.) there is no advantage to putting it in space, 2.) everything with mass costs $10,000 per kg to put into orbit, and 3.) in space, the only way to get rid of waste heat is with radiators. The LHC, for example, at peak usage uses 10 trillion watts. To radiate away 10 trillion watts, you'd need a radiator the size of a city.

Part fabrication costs: A really high number.
Boost to orbit costs: An astronomically large number.
Construction costs: An astronomically large number.
Construction time: Probably never.

The last one is kind of key. Even if enough money is scraped together to attempt the project, advances in technology would likely outpace construction. By a lot. In the time it would take to build such an accelerator, we would probably invent the technology to build a more powerful accelerator on Earth at a fraction of the cost and time.

[Anonymous No.6026364]

>>6026340
yes, why indeed?

[Anonymous No.6026371]

>>6026367
as always, it comes down to economics...

so depressing...

[Anonymous No.6026373]

>>6026367
I thought with more room we could get even more acceleration and get even closer to putting particles with mass at near light speeds. Perhaps I misunderstood.

[Anonymous No.6026391]

>>6026373
You could, but room is not currently the testing ceiling. There are likely a great many more advances to be made on the magnet front before that becomes an area of diminishing returns, and there is a lot, *a lot* more room on earth for building bigger collides.

[Anonymous No.6026398]

>>6026279

Squeezing particles into a smaller orbit from a large one has no advantage when it comes to the amount of energy in each collision, in fact it would decrease the energy if anything

[Anonymous No.6026475]

more rpm in a tighter circle != higher tangential velocity

[Anonymous No.6026476]

>>6026367
>1.) there is no advantage to putting it in space

It stops gravity pulling it down and ruining the results.

[Anonymous No.6026487]

>>6026391
>there is a lot, *a lot* more room on earth for building bigger collides.
It's seriously inconvenient to build such long vacuum chambers in a thick atmosphere, and maintain superconductivity in such a warm environment.

The only reason not to build it in space is that we're still not any good at going to space, so the transportation costs are infeasible.

[Anonymous No.6026495]

>>6026476


But if you wrap the collider around the earth, gravity would in a way aid acceleration

[Anonymous No.6026509]

>>6026495

That is fine. The earth surface based colliders are flawed because they're sideways.

[Anonymous No.6026513]

>>6026334

If the ball isn't travelling faster, then what about a similar example in in linear form.

Take a ping pong ball and bounce it on a table, now apply force to shorten the bounce of the ball, ie bringing your hand down over the ball towards the surface. Even though the force is absorbing the objects potential energy, the applied force increase the speed of the ball in each bounce.

[Anonymous No.6026806]

>>6026487
>It's seriously inconvenient to build such long vacuum chambers in a thick atmosphere
Valid claim
>and maintain superconductivity in such a warm environment.
Completely ignores how *incredibly* hard it is to dissapte waste heat in space.

[Anonymous No.6026817]

>>6026806
It's not hard to get rid of waste heat in space. You just build radiators.

Anyway, when I say "in space", I mean some sensible location like the moon or on an asteroid, not some stupid place like low Earth orbit.

[Anonymous No.6026825]

>>6026806
Couldn't they build one on the moon and dissipate the heat into the ground?

Plus 14 straight days of night with no atmosphere would get pretty darn cold for those superconductors

[Anonymous No.6026831]

>>6026825

Most logical solution. First we need a moon base, and a way to fabricate large parts from moon materials. 50+ years later, particle accelerator on the moon

[Anonymous No.6026842]

>>6026817
>It's not hard to get rid of waste heat in space. You just build radiators.

I'n not sure you've considered the size radiators to radiate away the amount if waste heat a particle collidor produces.

Lockheed Martin manufactures the radiators the ISS uses. When extended, each one has a surface area of 825 square feet, and can radiate 11.8 kw.

The LHC, at peak usage, consumes 10 trillion watts. With an equivilant efficency, you'd need a radiator 160 miles long and 160 miles wide to radiate away that much heat.

[Anonymous No.6026865]

>>6026825
why the fuck didn't we think of this during the cold war space race?

[Anonymous No.6026866]

>>6026842
Yes, you'll need fuckhuge fractal radiators for the other stuff, but those superconductors would not need cooling and thus the energy consumption is far reduced.

[Anonymous No.6027106]

>>6026866

You wouldn't save as much energy as you might think. The thermal insulation already in use for the superconducting wires is incredibly efficient. Getting the wires down to a superconducting temperature uses a lot of energy, but keeping them there doesn't take very much compared to the staggering amount being used to accelerate the particles. You're talking about building a radiator the size of twelve million football fields, off-planet, no less, in order to lower the total energy usage by an insignificant amount.

[Anonymous No.6027112]

>>6026842
i dont see your argument as being valid.

you got a tube around the earth. lots of magnets along this tube. and then you argue about a silly addition of 160x160 miles of radiators? thats nothing if distributed along the tube. Like it should be

[Anonymous No.6027148]

>>6027112

We were not discussing the particulars of an equator-sized particle collider, we were discussing the particulars of a space-based LHC equivalent.

Btw, I like the novelty of an equator-scale collider, but:
The LHC has a circumference of 17 miles, and cost 9 billion dollars to build. The circumference of the Earth at its equator is 24,900 miles. If costs scaled linearly (they wouldn't!), an Earth's-circumference collider would cost just over 13 trillion dollars. But no, costs wouldn't scale linearly. Such an outrageous mega-project would consume so much raw material it would skew the fabrication costs of every component involved. Mankind is also simply not in possession of enough refined niobium to build the magnets for such a collider. You would have to mine *for decades and decades* to have enough. Possibly centuries. Thus there is no hope of the cost scaling linearly. It would instead be so high as to be incalculable.

[Anonymous No.6027182]

>>6027148
Once again it all falls apart at the realistic cost of the project... I completely agree with what you said as being true, but damn is it depressing.

[Anonymous No.6027375]

Don't get so depressed. A more careful reading of my previous relies will reveal the reason to be optimistic about the future of particle colliders, which is that improvements in collider design nearly keep pace with requirements for higher-energy collisions.
A new avenue just begining to expand is detector ability and data anslysis. The next generation of linear colliders will be lower energy than LHC, but will be better able to observe and anslyze the results. Eventually, we *will* need higher-energy colliders, but there are many ways to improve a collider than to make it bigger.

[Anonymous No.6027405]

>>6026149
Time travel when?

[Anonymous No.6027433]

>>6027405
ITS IRRELEVANT

[Anonymous No.6027438]

>>6026842
>Lockheed Martin manufactures the radiators the ISS uses. When extended, each one has a surface area of 825 square feet, and can radiate 11.8 kw.
>
>The LHC, at peak usage, consumes 10 trillion watts. With an equivilant efficency, you'd need a radiator 160 miles long and 160 miles wide to radiate away that much heat.
Yes, if you make fantastically stupid assumptions, you can reach completely idiotic conclusions. Good for you.

Let's apply some similar reasoning to the LHC itself: it consumes 10 trillion watts. The Three Gorges Dam has a capacity of 22.5 billion watts, and draws on the power of the Yangtze river, which depends on a drainage basin of 1.7 million square km.

Since the LHC would need 445 such dams, it would need over 750 mllion square km of drainage basin, while the Earth's surface area is only about 500 million square km.

Clearly, the LHC can not exist.

[Anonymous No.6027484]

>>6026866
They would need cooling. Objects in space, objects in space in the light of the Sun can be passively cooled to maybe 40-50 K with a very good sunshield. You need to go a lot colder.

[Anonymous No.6027486]

>The LHC, at peak usage, consumes 10 trillion watts

No. Its power usage off the grid is around 100MW, it might be able to peak 10 trillion watts if you count some rapid discharge capacitors(so the peak lasts for 1/100th of a second), other than that no.

[Anonymous No.6027509]

>>6027484
It really depends where you are. The temperature of space is generally considered to be under 3K. 40-50 K isn't a limit, but something routinely achievable with a pretty crappy sunshield on a badly mass-limited system.

Anyway, you can do superconductivity at 40-50 K. The engineering decisions of the LHC aren't the only options, just the ones that looked best to certain people at a certain time under certain conditions.

[Anonymous No.6027530]

>>6027509
No, 3 K is the temperature of the CMBR. However you have things like the Sun to deal with which cause much higher temperatures.

40-50 K is currently the lowest you can get with only radiative passive cooling. That's witha a good sunshield not a crappy one.

Superconductors that work at those temperatures have not been produced on anywhere near sufficient scales.

[Anonymous No.6027548]

>>6026176

[Anonymous No.6027560]

>>6027530
>40-50 K is currently the lowest you can get with only radiative passive cooling.
>currently
We're not talking about today's shitty space technology.

"Currently" (in the same sense that you're using, of "things that have already been done in space", meaning, really, something more like "things that they started building with technology at least ten years old"), we are entirely incapable of building a large accelerator in space.

So when we talk about building giant space accelerators, we are obviously talking about having a lot of technology which doesn't exist yet, such as the ability to build large structures in space.

An actually *good* sun shield would be something like many layers of reflective foil cones a few atoms thick (or truncated cones, since we're shielding a circular track), separated from each other and what they're shielding by several kilometers. The second layer might be at your 40-50 K, but the third layer would only be heated by a distant object radiating at 40-50 K and the cosmic background radiation, the fourth layer would only be heated by the third, etc.

[Anonymous No.6027580]

>>6027560
You cannot get to 3 K in the inner solar system. Zodiacal dust emission dwarfs CMBR emission.
No, multilayer insulation by it's very nature cannot get to background temperature, it must always be greater than that.

And then there is heating from the device itself.

A good sunshield is a good one today, not a fantasy one.

[Anonymous No.6027584]

>>6026078
no, because there is a larger centripetal force. To maintain that centripetal force you have to use bigger magnets. which we don't have.

[Anonymous No.6027631]

>>6027580
Look, I never said that you could *reach* 3K by passive cooling, but you can obviously get lower than 40-50K without active cooling, because temperatures under 30K have been observed on the moon.

>A good sunshield is a good one today, not a fantasy one.
We're talking about giant particle accelerators in space.

I suppose if we were talking about the future of fusion power, you'd say "A good fusion core is a good one today, not a fantasy one."

Seriously, how stupid can you be?

[Anonymous No.6027638]

>>6027631
>We're talking about giant particle accelerators in space.
Then you should say feasible technology not good. If you're talking about future technology like this good and bad lose all meaning because you can always go better.

>"A good fusion core is a good one today, not a fantasy one."
Yes I would, they would make very bad power plants but there are still the best that exists today.

[Anonymous No.6027640]

>>6027638
>Yes I would
Confirmed for complete idiot.

>the best that exists today
This is not a sane reason to dismiss other possibilities in a discussion of future technology.

[Anonymous No.6028380]

>>6026337
I have a better question.

Why don't we just build a huge particle accelerator inside of your rectum?

It's obviously much more powerful than any magnets we have and it has the tightest orbital path known in the Universe.