Thread: Large Hadron Collider

Originally Posted by TheOriginalGrumpySpy

I would not equate volts to eV's.

honestly it's not quite clear what they're talking about here, and especially since this news bit was delivered by a lay reporter they're using imprecise language.

however, they probably do mean a 1.18 TV accelerating potential (or equivalent thereof)l. considering this is a particle collider, what matters is the energy per particle, not the energy of the entire particle beam pulse. thus probably each proton in the twin beams has 1.18 TeV of energy. (I mean kinetic energy, of course...)

And this isn't even with the beams at even close to full power. The maximum power of the LHC is be 7 TeV. Physicists say some experiments can be conducted at 3.5 TeV, or so I've gathered from sources I've read which again may or may not be accurate...

Originally Posted by ShitFace

I hope we get some answers about the boson particle. Sounds pretty interesting.

well, just to slightly correct your terminology, what they what to detect is the Higgs boson, which is the carrier particle for the "mass field," or whatever the technical name of that is. in that sense it's sort of analogous to photons which are the carrier particle for the electromagnetic field. just as photons mediates electromagnetic interactions, the Higgs boson mediates mass effects (no not the one from the fucking game), such as momentum.

bosons in general are particles whose wave functions interfere constructively with each other. to put it in easier to understand terms, basically they tend to go to the same state (i.e. the same position, the same speed, etc.). the opposite of bosons are fermions, which tend to want to be in different states. electrons are fermions, and their dislike for each other is what's primarily responsible for how electron orbitals fill up.