LHC at 2.36TEV

Seems to be an evening for abbreviations... From Popular Mechanics comes this excellent introduction to the Large Hadron Collider that is starting to do some good work.

The LHC Hits 2.36 Trillion Electron Volts�But What Does it Mean?
After more than a year of inactivity the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located 300 feet below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, is finally up and firing on all its superconducting magnets. On Nov. 30, a little over a week after it began sending protons zooming across a 17-mile circular tunnel, the LHC became the world's most powerful particle accelerator by accelerating its twin proton beams to 1.18 TeV (or 1.18 trillion electron volts). The previous record, 0.98 TeV, was set by Fermilab's Tevatron in 2001. And just two days ago, the LHC achieved another first�the highest-ever energy collision events, at 2.36 TeV (1.18 TeV per beam).

To wrap your head around such a mind-bogglingly huge number, it helps to start with some basics. An electron volt is a unit of energy that is commonly used in particle physics to describe atomic and nuclear processes (a volt, it should be noted, is not). More specifically, it is the kinetic energy gained by an electron as it is accelerated through a potential difference of one volt. A volt is equivalent to one joule (J), another measure of energy, per coulomb (C), a measure of electric charge. A single electron volt comes out to 1.602 � 10-19 J. The record-smashing energy generated by the LHC's collision events, therefore, only corresponds to 3.78 � 10-7 J, a minuscule quantity of energy. A 100-watt light bulb left on for an hour, by comparison, consumes 360,000 J.

When you look at it in the context of the vast amounts of energy that we regularly expend throughout our daily lives, it seems almost bizarre that such an infinitesimal amount of energy could provoke so much excitement among the scientific community. And that is precisely the point�you have to look at it on a subatomic scale to appreciate why this represents such a breakthrough.

An electron volt gives a proton enough kinetic energy to accelerate to 0.005 percent of the speed of light (3 x 108 meters per second). One trillion electron volts (TeV) would take it within a hair's breadth of the speed of light (99.999956 percent). But, again, one TeV is not big news, energy-wise; a TeV also holds roughly the kinetic energy of a fast-moving ant. The key difference, of course (and the reason why physicists are thrilled), is that an ant is much larger, and thus heavier (around 0.1 of a gram), than a proton (1.65 � 10-24 of a gram). So while a TeV may not seem like much by our standards, it is a huge amount of energy for a single proton.

A fun time to be alive! This machine is going to do some groundbreaking work -- a macroscope into the Universe.