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I'm more involved in the analysis / software side of research, and somebody who is working on hardware can probably tell you more about technology spin-offs. In

I'm more involved in the analysis / software side of research, and somebody who is working on hardware can probably tell you more about technology spin-offs. In fact, I'd like to hear about them, too. One thing that has been pioneered at the LHC is grid computing. Basically we were doing cloud computing before it was cool. Of course, the requirements of science and industry are different, and we were quickly overtaken in scale by Amazon, Google, etc.. But still, particle physicists were among the first to connect different data centers across the world to a unified resource. You just say "do this computation on this dataset" and the system finds the optimal place to perform the calculation without copying too much data around, and delivers the packaged up datasets back when it's done. Many spin-offs are small improvements of existing technology, giant leaps are rare. An example of an incremental step are improved solar panels [1] using LHC vacuum technology. There is also a lot of work done on superconductors and magnets that is cutting-edge, but I don't know if it has found application yet. We have a lot of hardware development that is really interesting, but too far away from consumer electronics to be used as a spin-off, like radiation hard electronics, or high precision particle detectors. Maybe some of this will go into medical devices. We used to be early adopters of machine learning (e.g. neural networks) and pattern recognition techniques, but have been utterly surpassed in these fields by industry recently, and are only starting to import modern techniques, like deep neural networks. [1]: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spin-off-more-efficient-solar-panels http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spi...

dnautics 10y ago
The superconductor stuff is persistent physics myth; commercial superconductors were largely developed for NMR spectrometers used by the petrochemical industry about a decade before superconducting supercolliders.
- jakub_h 10y ago
  Interesting, any references?
  - dnautics 10y ago
    http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMRS.pdf http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMR... first superconducting NMR magnet was built in 1962, by a commercial NMR company (bruker). 1970 was the first commercial superconducting FT-NMR. The first superconducting synchrotron was planned around 1974 (ESCAR) and wasn't completed. the SSC was first discussed in 1976. CEBAF is the first accelerator to actually deploy superconducting technology in any form... But its use is in the RF chambers (the walls of the rf chambers are superconducting which allows them to transfer energy by charge oscillation more efficiently to the electron beam), not in the bend magnets.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    also I believe the food industry was very interested in NMR. There's stuff like "nmr analysis to estimate fat content in cream cheese" sort of stuff in the very old (60s) literature. This shouldn't be surprising, as the way arnold Beckman got really wealthy (and got his name on pretty much every science building) was by inventing the pH meter, which was snapped up by the florida citrus industry.
exergy 10y ago
I work at CERN. We work on a cooling system that has found uses on satellites and also the International Space Station. Now, it would be wrong to say that CERN invented this. More that there was sufficient need at both CERN and in satellites for such a cooling system. Does it have a use beyond High Energy Physics? I'd like to think yes. It is impressively stable, thermally speaking. Another example is a colleague working on lasers with crazy narrow beams.

dnautics 10y ago

The superconductor stuff is persistent physics myth; commercial superconductors were largely developed for NMR spectrometers used by the petrochemical industry about a decade before superconducting supercolliders.

jakub_h 10y ago
Interesting, any references?
- dnautics 10y ago
  http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMRS.pdf http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMR... first superconducting NMR magnet was built in 1962, by a commercial NMR company (bruker). 1970 was the first commercial superconducting FT-NMR. The first superconducting synchrotron was planned around 1974 (ESCAR) and wasn't completed. the SSC was first discussed in 1976. CEBAF is the first accelerator to actually deploy superconducting technology in any form... But its use is in the RF chambers (the walls of the rf chambers are superconducting which allows them to transfer energy by charge oscillation more efficiently to the electron beam), not in the bend magnets.
- dnautics 10y ago
  also I believe the food industry was very interested in NMR. There's stuff like "nmr analysis to estimate fat content in cream cheese" sort of stuff in the very old (60s) literature. This shouldn't be surprising, as the way arnold Beckman got really wealthy (and got his name on pretty much every science building) was by inventing the pH meter, which was snapped up by the florida citrus industry.

exergy 10y ago

I work at CERN. We work on a cooling system that has found uses on satellites and also the International Space Station. Now, it would be wrong to say that CERN invented this. More that there was sufficient need at both CERN and in satellites for such a cooling system. Does it have a use beyond High Energy Physics? I'd like to think yes. It is impressively stable, thermally speaking. Another example is a colleague working on lasers with crazy narrow beams.