The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has run into an unanticipated
problem — it’s running out of disk space. “This year the LHC is
stable and reliable,” says Jorg Wenninger, head of operations at the
LHC. “It is working like clockwork. We don’t have much downtime.”
That’s actually the problem.
When the collider
was planned out, as Symmetry reports, scientists
expected that it would be running about a third of the time. The
rest of the time would be used for maintenance, refilling,
rebooting, and other such logistical tasks. But that’s not how it
seems to work in practice. This may be the first time in history
when technicians have made a bad estimate about uptime and had that
result in success. The
LHC is actually doing collisions about 70% of the time, more
than double its expected rate.
This faster collision rate lets scientists learn more about rare
processes and particles like the Higgs boson, which the LHC produces
about once per billion collisions. It’s also filling up their data
storage.
“The number of hard drives that we buy and store the data on is
determined years before we take the data, and it’s based on the
projected LHC uptime and luminosity,” said Jim Olsen, a physics
professor working on the CMS project, to Symmetry. “Because
the LHC is outperforming all estimates and even the best rosy
scenarios, we started to run out of disk space. We had to quickly
consolidate the old simulations and data to make room for the new
collisions.”
One reason for the huge glut of data is the number of different
experiments going on at
CERN. They all
have to jockey for time.
Part of the ATLAS/ALFA experiment apparatus at Point 1 in the
LHC tunnel. (Image: Ronaldus Suykerbuyk/CERN)
The
most recent experiment taking up collider time is on the ATLAS
hardware — and instead of focusing on the maximum number of
collisions possible (this is typically referred as “luminosity”),
the team is prepping for some low-speed, low-energy collisions. The
type of scattering they want to study is known as “elastic
scattering,” which occurs when two protons survive their encounter
with one another in the detector. Instead of smashing protons
together to see what happens when they collide, the goal is to
bounce them off each other and measure what happens after that. The
long-term goal is to better model cosmic rays and understand why
cosmic rays that hit our atmosphere split into an array of secondary
particles. By watching what happens to protons when they “bounce,”
scientists hope to better understand why cosmic rays split into
secondary particles when they strike Earth’s atmosphere.
One of the other goals of these upcoming experiments is to
measure the probability that two protons could pass directly through
each other without interacting at all. This is only possible
because, like other atoms (which are mostly made up of empty space),
protons are themselves composed of particles. In theory, it may be
possible for one proton to pass through another. How often
this happens is what we’re hoping to discover.
As for the low storage problem, maybe CERN should call
Backblaze.
They’ve got some pretty decent drive pods up and running…
Now read:
How does the Large Hadron Collider work?
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