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Topic: LHC (Read 3694 times)
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Re: LHC
« Reply #2 on: October 20, 2008, 05:03:36 pm » |
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The LHC is to the everyday cosmic ray bath we receive as the slightest drizzle is to Niagara falls, both in quantity and in intensity.
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Alvarin
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Re: LHC
« Reply #7 on: October 25, 2008, 09:51:38 am » |
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"The scientists have a really nice tradition - every 13.5 billion years they come together and construct a Collider ..."
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Death 999
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Re: LHC
« Reply #10 on: November 19, 2008, 04:09:09 pm » |
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Well, actually, that comparison is a tremendous understatement of the difference between the two.
The energy of these beams is going to be of order 1 TeV, and will have around 800 million collisions per second. Sounds like a lot.
Every square meter of the Earth's upper atmosphere averages one collision within 0.3% of that energy per second. Even just considering those, we thus have a total collision count per second of 500 trillion. That's almost a factor of a million greater.
But it doesn't end there. The LHC's operating energy is not anything special in the upper atmosphere - the energies go much higher. The energy band in which there are only 800 million collisions per second per GeV is around 100 TeV. So, for every collision the LHC causes, there are not only a million that are the same energy, there's one that's 100 times more powerful in the upper atmosphere. And everything in between, too. That one LHC collision also has thirty thousand partners at 3 times more power, a thousand partners at 10 times more power, and 30 partners at 30 times more power. And in between those, until we get down to mere GeV separations.
If we're willing to look at events less frequent than the LHC's collisions, it keeps going. There is around one collision above 10^19 eV per square kilometer per year. That means 500 million collisions that are 10 million times more energetic than anything in the LHC hit the earth every year.
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