4 ms·
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be significant energy contained in a beam of sub-atomic particles. Something like 100kg TNT equivalent (~500MJ)? Wow.
by zelos 3y ago
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be significant energy contained in a beam of sub-atomic particles. Something like 100kg TNT equivalent (~500MJ)? Wow.
- testtestabcdef 3y agoThat's crazy. I never would've thought that either. These small facts which you can barely read in "mainstream media" are what makes the LHC absolutely fascinating and impressive. I was always like "Yeah that's just a small beam and the magnets are to navigate it in circles". In retrospect it does make sense now why people were concerned about the collision of such beams.
- Ekaros 3y agoAlso, when you really think about it. Why would you need 27 kilometre long circle if you weren't dealing with some absolutely massive amounts of energy. Couldn't you do it with lot less?
- Sharlin 3y agoIndeed. It’s all about the curvature. Even with all those incredibly fancy superconducting magnets you just can’t force protons this fast onto a circular path any smaller than this when they very much would like to go straight.
- rcxdude 3y agoYeah, it has the energy of a semi truck going at a few hundred mph but in something that is about 1nanogram of mass (about that of the average human cell).
- londons_explore 3y agoHow much of the energy is in the moving electrons/protons, and how much energy is stored in the superconducting magnetic fields?
- datenwolf 3y agoAll of it in the relativistic kinetic energy of the beam. The energy in the superconductor magnets is a whole chapter of its own; their energy dissipating into heat is what makes the Helium boil off during a quench. Also static magnetic fields don't "do" work, by that I mean, that you can not extract energy from a magnetic field by sending particles through it: The Lorentz force is perpendicular to both the movement of the particle through the field, and perpendicular to the field itself. Hence taking the inner=scalar=dot product of the force vectors and trajectories they come out as 0, i.e. no work is done. You need dynamic magnetic fields to do work.
- fancyfredbot 3y agoThere's a great article on it here: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/parking-the-lhc-proton-train https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/parking-the-lhc-pro... "Enough stored energy to melt a ton of copper" "The beam dump is a solid graphite cylinder 8 meters long and under a meter in diameter. It’s wrapped in a stainless-steel case, filled with nitrogen gas, and surrounded by iron and concrete shielding."
- nvusuvu 3y agoDoes the beam dumps make the meterial they were dumped into radioactive? What is that process like?
- mrguyorama 3y agoAs discussed in one of the decommissioning articles someone else posted, it does make the beam dumb radioactive! I hadn't thought about it but it makes sense with how much energy you are pumping into not that many atoms in the end, and when you do that, you tend to get radioactive atoms.
- Sharlin 3y agoNot just any energy but ultrarelativistic protons! That’s going to result in all sorts of interesting daughter nuclei when they slam into the atoms in the buffer.
- pfdietz 3y agoThe protons that are hitting the dump are at energy far beyond the binding energy of a nucleus. When they hit nuclei there, they shatter them. A shower of progressively less energetic particles forms, including large numbers of newly freed neutrons. There are accelerator-driven fission reactor ideas that would use ~1 GeV protons (much less energetic than the protons here) to produce neutrons to drive a subcritical target. These might be useful to destroy certain nuclear waste isotopes.