Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons charged with approximately 7 TeVs of energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is now operational, and in the process of being prepared for first collisions. The first beam was circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008 and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October 2008.

Although a few individuals have questioned the safety of the planned experiments in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions.

Technical Design
The LHC is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The 3.8 metre (150 inches) diameter, concrete-lined tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider. It crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although most of it is in France. Surface buildings hold ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent beam pipes, each containing a proton beam (a proton is one type of hadron). The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1,232 bending magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 focusing magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature.

Once or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, the field of the superconducting bending magnets will be increased from 0.54 T to 8.3 T.

The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. At this energy the protons have a gamma factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.999999% of light speed. It will take less than 90 microseconds for a proton to travel once around the main ring (a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second). Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be bunched together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 ns apart. When the collider is first commissioned, it will be operated with fewer bunches, to give a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns. The number of bunches will later be increased to give a final bunch crossing interval of 25 ns.

Prior to being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared by a series of systems that successively increase their energy. The first system is the linear accelerator Linac 2 generating 50 MeV protons, which feeds the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB). There the protons are accelerated to 1.4 GeV and injected into the Proton Synchrotron (PS), where they are accelerated to 26 GeV. Finally the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is used to increase their energy to 450 GeV before they are at last injected (over a period of 20 minutes) into the main ring, where proton bunches are accumulated, accelerated (over a period of 20 minutes) to their peak 7 TeV energy, and finally stored for many hours (10 to 24) while collisions occur at the four intersection points.

The LHC will also be used to collide lead (Pb) nuclei with a collision energy of 1,150 TeV. The Pb ions will be first accelerated by the linear accelerator Linac 3, and the Low-Energy Injector Ring (LEIR) will be used as an ion storage and cooler unit. The ions then will be further accelerated by the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) before being injected into LHC ring, where they will reach an energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon.

Six detectors are being constructed at the LHC, located underground in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points. Two of them, the ATLAS experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are large, general purpose particle detectors. A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is designed to study the properties of quark-gluon plasma from the debris of heavy-ion collisions. The other three, LHCb, TOTEM, and LHCf, are smaller and more specialized.

Detectors

BBC quotes about LHC CMS detectors:

“ ATLAS - one of two so-called general purpose detectors. Atlas will be used to look for signs of new physics, including the origins of mass and extra dimensions

CMS - the second general purpose detector will, like ATLAS, hunt for the Higgs boson and look for clues to the nature of dark matter

ALICE - will study a "liquid" form of matter called quark-gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang

LHCb - Equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang. LHCb will try to investigate what happened to the "missing" anti-matter”

Purpose
When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared with the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including supersymmetric particles, compositeness (technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.

Research

When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC. Physicists hope to use the collider to test various grand unified theories and enhance their ability to answer the following questions:

* Is the popular Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model realised in nature? If so, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?

* Will the more precise measurements of the masses of the quarks continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?

* Do particles have supersymmetric ("SUSY") partners?

* Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?

* Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?

* What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?

* Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces?

Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet $100 the mega-experiment will not find the elusive particle seen as the holy grail of cosmic science. "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs," said Prof Hawking. Hawking said the experiment could discover superpartners, particles that would be "supersymmetric partners" to particles already known about. "Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together," he said on the BBC. "Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe," he said.

As an ion collider

The LHC physics program is mainly based on proton-proton collisions. However, shorter running periods, typically one month per year, with heavy-ion collisions are included in the programme. While lighter ions are considered as well, the baseline scheme deals with lead ions. This will allow an advancement in the experimental programme currently in progress at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

Test timeline

September 2008

The first beam was circulated through the collider on the morning of 10 September 2008. CERN successfully fired the protons around the tunnel in stages, several kilometres at a time. The particles were fired in a clockwise direction into the accelerator and successfully steered around it at 10:28 am local time. The LHC successfully completed its first major test, for after a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen showing the protons traveled the full length of the Collider. CERN plans to send it counterclockwise, and eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made. It took less than one hour to guide the stream of particles around its inaugural circuit.

October 2008

The first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October 2008.

Proposed upgrade

After some years of running, any particle physics experiment typically begins to suffer from diminishing returns; each additional year of operation discovers less than the year before. The way around the diminishing returns is to upgrade the experiment, either in energy or in luminosity. A luminosity upgrade of the LHC, called the Super LHC, has been proposed, to be made after ten years of LHC operation. The optimal path for the LHC luminosity upgrade includes an increase in the beam current (i.e., the number of protons in the beams) and the modification of the two high luminosity interaction regions, ATLAS and CMS. To achieve these increases, the energy of the beams at the point that they are injected into the (Super) LHC should also be increased to 1 TeV. This will require an upgrade of the full pre-injector system, the needed changes in the Super Proton Synchrotron being the most expensive.

Cost

The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion. The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007. 180 million francs (€120 million) of the cost increase have been due to the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. In part this was due to faulty parts loaned to CERN by fellow laboratories Argonne National Laboratory or Fermilab.

Computing resources

The LHC Computing Grid is being constructed to handle the massive amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider. It incorporates both private fibre optic cable links and existing high-speed portions of the public Internet, to get data from CERN to academic institutions around the world.

The distributed computing project LHC@home was started to support the construction and calibration of the LHC. The project uses the BOINC platform to simulate how particles will travel in the tunnel. With this information, the scientists will be able to determine how the magnets should be calibrated to gain the most stable "orbit" of the beams in the ring.

Safety issues

Safety of particle collisions

Main article: Safety of the Large Hadron Collider

Although some individuals, including some scientists, have questioned the safety of the planned experiments in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions.

Operational safety

The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique operational issues on account of the huge energy stored in the magnets and the beams. While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ.

Loss of only one ten-millionth part (10−7) of the beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must absorb an energy equivalent to that of a typical air-dropped bomb. These immense energies are even more impressive when one considers how little matter is carrying it. Under nominal operating conditions (2,808 bunches per beam, 1.15×1011 protons per bunch), the beam pipes contain 1.0×10-9 gram of hydrogen, which, in standard conditions for temperature and pressure, would fill the volume of one grain of fine sand.

Construction accidents and delays

On 25 October 2005, a technician was killed in the LHC tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped. On 27 March 2007 a cryogenic magnet support broke during a pressure test involving one of the LHC's inner triplet (focusing quadrupole) magnet assemblies, provided by Fermilab and KEK. No one was injured. Fermilab director Pier Oddone stated "In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces". This fault had been present in the original design, and remained during four engineering reviews over the following years. Analysis revealed that its design, made as thin as possible for better insulation, was not strong enough to withstand the forces generated during pressure testing. Details are available in a statement from Fermilab, with which CERN is in agreement. Repairing the broken magnet and reinforcing the eight identical assemblies used by LHC delayed the startup date, then planned for November 2007, by several weeks.

In popular culture

The Large Hadron Collider has been featured in a number of novels, including Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer, Black Hole by Angelo Paratico, and Decipher by Stel Pavlou, which described it in some detail. One of the most visible examples is Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, which involves dangerous antimatter created at the LHC used as a weapon against the Vatican. CERN published a "Fact or Fiction?" page discussing the accuracy of the book's portrayal of the LHC, CERN, and particle physics in general. The movie version of the book had footage filmed on-site at one of the experiments at the LHC; the director, Ron Howard, also met with CERN experts in an effort to make the science in the story more accurate. Katherine McAlpine, aka "alpinekat", a science writer working at CERN, wrote the lyrics for a personal rap video about the LHC called the "The Large Hadron Rap". The song was added to YouTube on 28 July 2008, and, as of 6 September, it had been viewed more than a million times.

BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting "Big Bang Day" on 10 September 2008 to coincide with the LHC being switched on. Included in this event will be a radio episode of the TV series Torchwood, with a plot surrounding the LHC, entitled Lost Souls.

On September 10, to commemorate the firing of the Large Hadron Collider, Google displayed a custom logo with a drawing of the LHC which linked to a web search for "Large Hadron Collider". It is a tradition for Google to change their logo to represent what they consider to be important or interesting events.

Open Source Software

If you are an end user and wants to know about a computer program & its codes, it may not be easy, specially in the making of a monopoly over software by giant software firm.

and if you are a beginner in programming & wants to see & experiment some codes, may not be an easy one as the programmers usually were busy & getting reliable codes are also a dream for many.

last but not least, if you are a programmer looking for a platform to publish your project work, discuss issues with similar minded persons & publish codes, there is a centralized resource site which will satisfy all the needs of the above said category, its SourceForge.net.

It is said to be the world's largest Open Source software development web site. SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code.

So, finding the open source programs & codes are now easy.

Project Managment - Best Practices

In the last article we discussed in general the challenges faced in Project Management. In general there are lot more challenges we face than mentioned. Let's first discuss the best practices in Project Management before we end up with more challenges.

Best practices followed in software project management to maintain a well-orchestrated team to create and claim sustainable values. The points mentioned here are not in any order of priority.

1. Customer Focus
When you encourage the team, definitely they will put in great efforts to come out with an excellent product that delights the customer. At the same time, you need to make sure that the team understands the pains of the customer and also the impact of bad products on the brand name of the organization.

As this is a primary concern of any organization, you need to work on this activity constantly and continuously throughout the execution of the project. This helps you to sustain the relationship with the customer and also get repeated orders. Needless to mention about the good will and the references you get, when you delight the customer.

Moral: Customers is the real boss; you need to keep him happy

2. Recognition
Nothing can motivate the developers to a great extent as recognizing the great piece of work done by them. When you recognize their work, they feel honored and important. It also brings in a feeling of belongingness and great satisfaction to the developers.

The project managers can use email facilities and team meetings as effective tools to recognize people. You can send out an appreciation mail or praise the developer in the team meetings, which are within your scope. When you couple this with the recognition awards of the organization, it can do wonders as recognitions improve the performance of the individual as well as the team.

Moral: Recognition is the greatest motivator

3. Communicating the Project Plan
Communicating the project plan to all the team members is as important as creating the project plan. You need to keep the team well informed about the plan so that they can visualize the bigger picture.

Moral: Understanding the plan is the first step towards delivering a quality product

4. Strategy
You need to devise a good strategy to successfully implement the various aspects of the project plan. You might have derived a good plan, but still, if your strategy is poor, it can yield disastrous results. You as a project manager need to liaise with the architects and senior developers while framing major strategies.

Moral: Strategy can mar or improve the effectiveness of a plan

5. Suitable Methodology
It is highly important that you need to be careful while choosing a proper methodology for the project execution. A process life cycle, which is an excellent fit for a project in one area or domain, may not fit in other domains or areas.

Moral: One manager's food is another manager's poison

6. Business Functionality
You need to ensure a good understanding of business functionality among the project team. With all the technical knowledge in this world, one may not be able to beat a person who has good functional knowledge. That explains the importance of having good functional knowledge among the team. You as a project manager need to ensure that the due diligence documents are constantly updated to reflect the knowledge gained during project execution.

Moral: Knowledge is power

7. Project Review Meetings
A weekly/fortnightly Project Review Meeting is very much required for a project. Besides helping to keep track of the project execution, it helps in keeping the team focused. It makes each and every member of the team know what is happening in the other part of the project, which is required to understand and visualize the project in bigger picture. You can share
all the important and significant organizational changes/initiatives in the meeting. You need to ensure that action items are noted and recorded in the Minutes of Meeting (MOM) document and tracked to closure. If you look at this meeting as more of information sharing and execution point of view, rather than as a statutory requirement to comply with Quality Management
System (QMS), you can benefit more out of it.

Moral: A map is of no use if you do not know where you are

8. One-on-One Meetings
Unlike the Project Review Meetings mandated by the QMS of the organizations, a one-on-one is very special in its kind. The purpose of one-on-one meeting is to create a continuous learning environment, which is very much essential in the software industry. One-on-one meetings build
trust between the project manager and the team members. Since it is on a one-on-one basis, the chances are more for the team members to freely share their views, discuss issues, and express concerns in an open manner. You can understand the concerns of the team members and resolve them at an early stage through these meetings.

You can effectively use these meetings to groom and mould the team. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to do a formal annual appraisal and give the review feedback, the project manager can take the one-on-one meeting as an opportunity to give informal feedback to the team members about their strengths and possible areas of improvement. Since it is not a formal appraisal, chances are very high that the team members will respond to the feedback in a more positive way and would discuss with keen interest to improve their strengths or overcome the shortcomings. On the other hand, it provides the project manager an ample opportunity to assess and gauge the team members at work on a periodic basis and encourage them to learn or improve continuously. It is human psychology to work more to achieve a goal when there is a sense of urgency. For instance, the students at college study with all sincerity just before the examinations. As it is true at work places too, you can utilize the one-on-one meetings to create the sense of urgency. You can set short-term goals to team members in one of these meetings and evaluate the progress in the subsequent meetings. You can also use these meetings as an opportunity to drive the organizational changes, though that is not the main purpose. The success of a one-on-one lies entirely on the way it is conducted. You need to conduct it in a totally informal and friendly manner, of course without losing the focus. Care should be taken to make sure that no unrealistic promises are made to the team members to fulfill their aspirations. You can conduct these meetings regularly once in a month on convenient days when you are free from your routine activities.

Moral: Run as fast as you can, just to stay in place.

9. T-Cons
In this industry, often we work with people who are geographically apart. At times emails create two islands of people communicating over a sea of misunderstanding. This, besides distracting the environment, creates an unhealthy atmosphere. Teleconferences (T-Cons) between onsite and offshore parties help eliminate most of these communication problems. You can use T-Cons to communicate effectively with your customer and build mutual trust with them. It is a good practice to include the entire team in T-Cons whenever possible. This brings all the team members to the same level and also, helps you to groom the team indirectly in communication
skills. You should prepare the MOMs at the end of every call and send it to all the participants to ensure that every issue is understood in a proper way and track the issues to closure. As a thumb rule, one should not get onto emails unless otherwise warranted.

Moral: Voice is better than text

10. Encourage Finding Bugs
You need to encourage your team members to find as many defects as possible in the work products. Earlier they find, the cheaper it is to fix. Concerns regarding linking of defects and performance appraisals are to be removed as otherwise the team members might hide the bugs.

Moral: A stitch in time saves nine

Project Managment - Challenges

Software Project Management differs from other project managements in several ways.

The Project Manager, like a captain on a ship, is ultimately responsible for the success of a project. The project manager, besides being the focal point for the project execution, is responsible for driving organizational initiatives and changes, and keeping the customer delighted all the time. Most of the software projects fail not because they are inherently complex, but mainly because of the poor project management. You can be a smart
programmer capable of writing complex programs, but it is not enough for project management. The project management skills are quite different. It involves getting the work done by others, the way you want and yet making them feel happy about it.

Challenges in Software Project Management

Software Project Management is different from other disciplines or fields. Some of the factors contributing to the differences are listed below, and these factors complicate Software Project Management:


1. Working Remotely: At times, you need to work with people living geographically at different locations, which you might not have met. This leads to a lot of communication problems.

2. Invisibility of the Final Product: Though there are intermediate work products in each phase of the software development life cycle, the end user and at times the developer are not able to visualize the final product through the various software artifacts. In contrast, in case of a bridge or building construction, the end user and the worker can actually visualize the final product evolving.

3. Knowledge Workers: Working with well-educated people is easy as well as tough. As the developers are smart and equally educated as the project manager, managing them becomes easy. It becomes more difficult mainly because of the knowledge level differences in a particular technology or domain where the developers may have more knowledge.

4. Technological Changes and Market Openings: The software developers have to continuously improve the knowledge level due to the technological changes. This, on the other hand, paves a way to them to acquire jobs that lead to high attrition rates, which ultimately lands the project manager in trouble.

Thinking of how to handle these challenges.