LHC Season 2 : VNR B-Roll
2 June 2015
LHC Season 2 : VNR B-roll
CERN, Geneva.
Some natural sound and some speech.
00.00
Annotated animation: An introduction to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It follows the journey of protons, from where they start in a bottle of hydrogen gas, through the various steps in the accelerator chain where they increase in energy, until they reach the LHC where two beams of protons are accelerated and then made to collide. The collisions occur at four points around the LHC at the centre of four big detectors: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Each collision produces hundreds of particles that leave tracks in the detectors, creating a huge stream of data the computing grid distributes around the world for analysis. The analyses reconstruct the most interesting collisions and slowly build up information in graphs that reveal the underlying physics – such as the production of the particle known as the Higgs boson.
02.27
Annotated animation. Proton bunches in the LHC collide to form a Higgs boson, which immediately decays (changes) into particles that leave a distinctive pattern of tracks in a detector
02.42
Scenes, with sound, from CERN on the day of the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson at the LHC, 4 July 2012, with Peter Higgs (wearing glasses).
02.55
Scenes, with sound, from the CERN Control Centre LHC restart images on 5 April 2015, when the LHC restarted after a shutdown of 2 years for maintenance and consolidation.
03.42
Annotated animation showing how an LHC radiofrequency cavity works. Particles make 11,245 turns per second in the LHC. Every time a particle has made a turn in the LHC, it passes by a region where it is accelerated by electric fields. These fields are produced inside a so-called “Radiofrequency Cavity”. Inside the cavity, the direction of the field oscillates between positive (red) and negative (blue) voltage, so that the incoming particles always see an accelerating electric field.
04.30
Annotated animation showing how an LHC dipole magnet works. Two particle beams circulate in the LHC, in opposite directions.To keep them on their circular track, their trajectories have to bent using magnetic fields.The field is generated by two coils producing fields pointing in opposite directions for the two counter-rotating beams. The coils are cooled to -271.2 degrees Celsius so they become superconducting and when the LHC is operating at energy of 6.5 TeV per beam, a current of nearly 11,000 amps flows through them without any resistance, generating a magnetic field of 7.8 tesla. Each dipole magnet deflects the path by only 0.3 degrees, and about 1200 dipole magnets are needed to bend the beams around the 27-km circle of the LHC.
05.21
Annotated animation showing how an LHC collimator works. Individual particles from each beam can stray off their foreseen path and hit the beam pipe or even the inner part of a detector. Therefore, the beam has to be ‘cleaned’ from these stray particles before coming close to the collision regions. Before each experiment, there are devices called collimators to do do this job. By moving two absorber plates close to each other, only the central part of each beam (with a diameter of about 1 mm) manages to get through, while the stray particles are absorbed.
06.25
Annotated animation. The LHC beam is formed of many bunches of particles (up to 2808), each measuring a few centimetres long and a millimetre wide. Their width is smaller than the size of Spain on a 1 Euro coin. However, the bunch size is not constant around the ring. Each bunch, as it circulates around the LHC, gets squeezed and expanded. It gets squeezed as much as possible around the interaction points to increase the probability of a collision. As they approach the collision points, they are squeezed to about 16 micrometers (a human hair is about 50 micrometers thick) to allow for a greater chance of collisions.
06.47
Animation showing the squeezing of the LHC beams as they collide together.
06.58
Footage of the ATLAS detector.
08.10
Footage of the ALICE detector.
08.55
Footage inside the LHC tunnel, including the 15-m long blue tubes containing the dipole magnets.
09.10
Footage of the CMS detector.
09.38
Footage (with some background noise) of the LHCb detector.
09.50
Footage inside the tunnel of the Super Proton Synchtron (SPS) - the last step in acceleration before the LHC.
10.13
Animation created of an actual collision event recorded in ATLAS in 2010. It shows the race through the LHC, ending in the detector where the particle collision occurs, creating a Z boson that decays to two muons.
11.08
Animation of three quarks held together by gluons to make a proton
11.34
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Installing shuntsto provide an alternate pathway for the 11,000-amp current to safely pass from magnet to magnet in the event of a fault. (Some background noise.)
11.56
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Installing pressure relief devices. (Some background noise.)
12.06
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Insulating spoolpieces. (Some background noise.)
12.16
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Insulating busbars. (Some background noise.)
13.12
Scientists talking (in various languages) about their expectations for Run 2 of the LHC. In order of appearance:
Patrick Koppenburg
Claire Lee
Rebeca GonzalezSuarez
Barbara Storaci
Mateusz Ploskon
Mike Flowerdew
Claire Lee
Freya Blekman
Mika Vesterinen
13.42
General aerial footage of the CERN site from the Globe of Science and Innovation.
14.40 : ENDS
Issued by the CERN Press Office +41 22 767 4101