Access for People
Posted by Mike Anderson on 11 Mar 2010 at 05:03 pm
Click for live LHC beam status.
We don’t let people go down underground to certain areas to check or fix things while the beam is on. There’s always a tiny chance of losing control of a beam, or protons in the beam interacting with the beam pipe and creating other high-energy particles that could go through people.
Even when the beam is off, other hazards include the fact that the beam pipe magnets are cooled with a lot of liquid helium. The beam pipe is about 300 feet underground, so should enough of that liquid be warmed enough to turn into gas quickly it would make it hard have enough oxygen down there to breathe.
Anyway, when you see “Access” on the LHC beam status page it means people are down underground somewhere trying to check or fix something and so the beam will remain off until they’re out of harm’s way.
–Mike
Thanks for the explanation. Im very intrigued by this page. Im not a scientist and dont really understand what all this page is showing. But, I have been following the progress of the LHC for a long time and, which I understood more.
If possible, could you describe the other items on this status page?
Thanks,
Steve
I’m also interested in a “user’s guide” to decipher what I’m seeing, not only on this page, but on all the available monitor pages via the drop-down box on the left.
I’m fascinated … without even knowing precisely what it is I’m looking at.
Is “intensity” in eV?
- Chris
There is a list of acronyms you can find here:
http://lhccwg.web.cern.ch/lhccwg/Bibliography/UsefulAcronyms.htm
Energy of the beam is measured in electron-volts, but intensity of the beam is measured in number of protons.
Steve And Chris I invite you to take a look at the LHC Portal where there a a large number of links in the portal section as well as dicussion in the Forum section. This page of the portal has an explanation of the areas of LHC page one op-vistar shown above.
Oops that was the LHC_operation page I linked to above.
This is the description of Page one.
Mike – Harbles,
Thanks this info is great. I appreciate the feedback and the links. Very Cool Stuff!