Why couldn't the LHC have been put on a microchip?

[Genecks]

Serious question.

 

Why couldn't the Large Haldron Collider have been put on a microchip?

Crazy thought, maybe. But a serious question.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Genecks

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

You need to accelerate protons to incredible energies, which requires running them around in a loop while you pump more energy into them. But to pull them into a loop you need to keep bending their paths, which takes energy. So you don't want to force them to make sharp bends.

 

There's just no way of accelerating a proton to such a high speed in a short distance. You couldn't make an electromagnetic field strong enough to do it in a few inches.

 

One current field of research is laser wakefield acceleration, where lasers are used to induce an incredibly strong electric field to accelerate electrons much faster than you could normally achieve:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-wakefield_acceleration

[Genecks]

Yeah, prior to your posting but after I made the thread, I found this video:

 

One of the reasons I questioned it is because of how CERN (CORRECTION:Fermilab) and LHC came about. It seems like LHC came about after CERN (CORRECTION: Fermilab) was developed. And the other thing is the amount of land these scientific enterprises take up. The LHC took up a large amount of space. Because of that, I became curious as to whether or not it could be put on a microchip or something really small. Because very small particles are being played with, I couldn't see why it wouldn't be practical to have a proton be looped around on a microchip. I don't know how; but I didn't understand why it wouldn't be practical.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Genecks

[Schneibster]

The cascades of detectors, for all the different classes they want to look at, are many times the size of a human. That's probably the best answer, closest to answering the question you think you're asking, Genecks. ;D

 

It's not the particles, it's all the different detectors we want to run them through. Because some of these particles are very elusive, their detectors have to be correspondingly physically large to increase their probability to detect them to something reasonable. In addition there is a minimum size for a given energy, dictated by the strength of the strongest magnetic fields we can make, which requires the accelerator track to be miles long; but the question remains, from the IP, "Why can't we put all the detectors on a chip even if we have to make the accelerator rings huge?" and that too is a valid question, and almost certainly of interest to everyone.

 

Looking at the huge ATLAS detector for the LHC with a tiny human standing next to it makes the point; the beam is coming in a millimeter wide. Yet there are tens of meters of detection equipment. And this is as it should be. In fact, some of the particles that the LHC makes are sent through solid rock to a point many miles away in Italy, where there is a neutrino laboratory. The miles thick solid rock acts as a filter, leaving only the neutrinos on the end of the beamline.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Schneibster

[davidivad]

well;

the lhc really packs a punch.

my guess is, and i could be wrong, but the particle beam is larger than the chip.

scaling down the number of particles might decrease the overall power requirements but you would lose the most important thing about the lhc.

the number of collisions required to make a statistical analysis.

think about how long they had to run the lhc to find the higgs.

and a particle has a decay time that would place decay outside of the chips dimensions.

like schneibster said, the detectors have to be big.

beyond that, that little chip would have to have some big leads.

[Schneibster]

You want to try to get a whole picture of the particle cloud from each collision, and so you layer the detectors so that the stuff that penetrates gets detected at the outside and the stuff that doesn't penetrate gets detected at the inside of the detector array. What's impressive is that we already know so much that the detectors are thirty feet tall!

 

I have pictures of setups from the '40s and '50s and they're the size of your fist! Wilson Cloud Chambers. With a diaphragm to supersaturate the air just when the synchrotron beam goes through. Think of that now.

 

HEP is so very gaudy and has so much sexy hardware. Fifteen tons of it is like some sort of erotic dream or something to someone like me.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Schneibster

[Sensei]

I have pictures of setups from the '40s and '50s and they're the size of your fist! Wilson Cloud Chambers.

 

It's impractical size.

Mine diffusion cloud chamber has size 40 cm x 25 cm x 25 cm = 25 L.

The bigger chamber is the longer traces of particles you can observe (and the harder is to cool it down and the more energy is wasted in this process).

Some electrons with high energy can leave >20 cm traces.

For measurement we want them to fit entirely inside of chamber.

 

[Schneibster]

They didn't figure that out for a while. When they did they started making them bigger.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Schneibster

[Dekan]

Would it be possible to make a computer simulation of the LHC, then you could get the results, such as finding the Higgs Boson, with less hardware?

[Sensei]

Would it be possible to make a computer simulation of the LHC, then you could get the results, such as finding the Higgs Boson, with less hardware?

 

Software is based on currently known laws of physics from previous experiments.

You can't find this way completely new thing.

 

If you will have

printf( "%d\n", rand() % 7 );

it will always show result from 0...6 and never show results outside of the range..