Information about LHC

The following information might be useful. It’s about the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. This is the the device which accelerates particles to almost the speed of light. It lies in an underground tunnel 27 kilometres long.

Videos

 

ATLAS Walkway and Observation Room

The major “inaccuracy” in Time Crystal, that is, the major things which are describe which do not actually exist, are

• the covered Walkway from the Globe to the ATLAS Control Building
• the ATLAS Observation Room

Both of these items were in the original plans for the ATLAS buildings. In the story Wyken Seagrave imagines that by 2012 both of them will have been constructed, but at the time of writing the story (2007) neither exist.

A minor “inaccuracy” is that the Mercator software does not exist. This is described in the SciSoftA entry in this blog.

 

SciSoftA

In the novel Time Crystal SciSoftA is Alex Karolyi’s Hungarian software company. It’s web site is www.scisofta.com. It was this company that wrote Mercator, the software that allows ATLAS scientists (and visitors) to retrieve event data and create images on the screen.

In reality there are several pieces of software in ATLAS that do a similar job.

Details of Persint can be found at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/PersintWiki
Information on Atlantis is at http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/atlantis/

Wyken Seagrave imagines Mercator as a combination of these two pieces of software. The view they characters get in Volume 1 in the ATLAS Observation Room is supposed to be like Persint while the view in USA15 is like Atlantis.

 

ATLAS

ATLAS is one of the main particle detectors in CERN. The image above shows the webcam. It is pointing at the end of the detector where the disaster happened on Crystal Day in 2012. Depending on which way it is pointing you might see the big wheel fixed to the end of ATLAS and the beam pipe shield.

Click here to go to the main public ATLAS web site in Geneva.

Click here for the scientists’ main ATLAS page.

Earlier versions of this story (which you can read on this web site) went into more detail about ATLAS and how the engineers control it. You can find a lot of the technical details on the ATLAS Twiki.

 

Council for European Nuclear Research

CERN is the Conseil Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire. Founded in 1954 it is now the world’s leading site for research in high energy physics. It lies on the plain between the Jura Mountains in the West and the Alps in the South and East. It nestles on the outskirts of the city of Geneva in the French speaking part of Switzerland and the main site actually lies across the Franco-Swiss border.

CERN contains the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, due to begin operating in December 2007. As shown in the image it is almost 9 kilometers across, reaching from the foothills of the Juras to Geneva airport. It lies in a tunnel roughly 100 metres under the ground.

The LHC will accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and then collide them inside huge detectors. The largest of these is ATLAS.

ATLAS is a particle detector as large as a cathedral that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe, search for new discoveries in the head on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1800 physicists (Including 400 students) participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 35 countries.

ATLAS lies in a huge cavern near the main entrance to CERN. The ATLAS Control Room is on the surface, not far from the Globe of Innovation. The USA15 underground cavern contains much of the electronics and cryogenic (cooling) equipment. The SDX1 building contains the lift down to USA15. This sketch shows these buildings.

Time Crystal is set in the year 2012 and the author expects that by then a covered walkway will have been built between the Globe of Innovation and the Atlas Control Room.

For more information about CERN visit http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
For details about ATLAS see http://atlas.ch/