Now I Know How My Students Feel!!

Another busy day, lectures in the morning with Frank Close, an introduction to particle physics. A lecture on the particle detector CMS by Piotr Traczyk. An amazing opportunity to ask Frank Close questions one-on-one over (his) lunch. Witnessing a fully packed, sitting on the floor only, lecture theatre listening to the Director General, Rolf Heuer (DG as he is known) talk to the people working at CERN about the short term and mid term plans for the collider, my mind is swirling with new information and many more questions are now surfacing in my head! Now I know what my students feel like when I introduce a new concept and ask them to go home and do some work on it...where do I start!

My colleagues and I have put together a considerable list of questions about all the lectures we have been priveledged to experience so far. My knowledge is severely lacking and I was having some trouble trying to piece the puzzle together. My Danish colleague pointed me to this fabulous site that goes through, in an interactive and quiz based way, the idea of matter and the big questions about what it is. Take a look at this great site:

www.particleadventure.org

My Scottish colleague also pointed me towards a great resource for teachers, who may be lacking in current audio-visual resources. Have a look at this site for free videoclips that you could use:

http://www.teachers.tv/

Tomorrow we are going to be listening to Part 3 & 4 of our series of lectures on particle physics with Frank Close, from Oxford University. I look forward to being able to discuss some of these aspects of particle physics on my blog at a later time.

The second part of our day was spent listening to Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN and Steve Meyers explaining the amazing story of the events that culminated last September, that put the LHC project on hold. The full story of what took place is only now just becoming apparent to the people working on it. It was in May of this year that the physicists realised that it was the joins between the different sections of the superconducting material and its copper casing that were not soldered properly. A superconducting material should have a VERY VERY VERY small resistance, about 10 micro-ohms at room temperature (about 300 K). The problem was the way the cables were joined. One of 1000's of joints was incorrectly soldered and this meant that the path of the current, which is at 13000 A, encountered a greater resistance, sparking the electrical arc which proved to be the reason for shutting off of the LHC, as the arcing produced considerable damage to one of the sectors of the LHC. The timeline proposed today sees the last of the initial testing of the superconducting cable to be finished by August (so that hopefully no more arcing will take place), but there is no official word on when the collider will be back online. Many are hoping that it will be in September this year, although more testing and repair may be required. The LHC will not be up to full power at this time either, with test runs of the proton beams assumed to be only at about 4 TeV, not the required 7 TeV.
(1 TeV = 1.6 x 10^-7 J, the prefix ‘T’ stands for Tera it is equal to 1 trillion = 1000000000000).

That's all for now from CERN :)