crawler wrote: ↑Sun Mar 31, 2024 9:55 pm
Looks like a typo, it was 20 units of time, probly milli seconds.
Except ...
The LHC track is 17 miles long.
Light travels at 186000 miles a second.
So light would complete one circuit in 0.000091 seconds … approximately 0.0001 seconds
A millisecond is 0.001 seconds.
So light could make 10 circuits of the track in one millisecond ... or 200 circuits in 20 milliseconds.
Meaning that the protons in their test, assuming that typo, must have been traveling at roughly 1/200 the speed of light.
BUT …
Each run of the LHC starts with a linear accelerator which accelerates bunches of protons (ions) to 150MeV. From there they are dumped into a small circular accelerator called the Booster which gets the protons up to about 1.4 GeV. From there they go to another circular accelerator called the PS ring which accelerates them up 26 GeV. Then they enter yet another circular accelerator (the SPS) which gets them up to 450 GeV. Only then are they moved to the LHC which accelerates them up to multiple TeV.
So it seems to me the protons in the test were probably at least 450 GeV and I found several charts and a relativistic calculator (
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/relativistic-ke) that show the velocity of a 450 GeV proton is already very close to the speed of light. Even at much lower energy … say the 1.4 GeV of the Booster, the velocity would be about 90 percent the speed of light. So unless I’m missing something … which certainly is possible ... I'm not sure it's the typo that you suggest.