The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will attempt to form its first particle beam on Wednesday, Sept. 10th, enabled by EEs who designed its superconducting magnets, detectors and worldwide grid computing network. The LHC was constructed at the CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire or European Council for Nuclear Research, Geneva). View a live webcast of the event at 4 a.m. Eastern Time Sept. 10, at: http://webcast.cern.ch/. The LHC consists of a 16-mile long ring of superconducting magnets cooled with 60 tons of liquid helium to -456 degree Fahrenheit. Two beams of protons traveling opposite directions will each achieve an energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolts), resulting to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Many experiments will be performed by the LHC that plumb the mysteries of the universe.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210600384
