Thursday, September 25, 2008

LHC Project Simulator

OK, I had way too much fun playing with this thing.

Even though the LHC is going to be down till after the scheduled winter shutdown, doesn't mean we all can't pretend that it is running and already producing collisions. In fact, WE can actually simulate a run and start hunting for those elusive particles after all!

This is a LHC project simulator. It tries to simulate the possible outcome of a collision based on the beam/magnet parameters that one start with. It's a lot of fun in a cartoonish sort of way. If only the actual thing is this easy. :)

Zz.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Superb - I'd like to link to this on my own blog it that's ok.
Re signature, did you manage to get a match? At what time did it occur? I haven't found one yet..
Cormac

ZapperZ said...

Go ahead. It's something I found anyway.

And after playing with it for about an hour (I had to adjust the energy and then play around with the magnet and magnet temperature), I still could not get a match. So I'm not very good at this.

:)

Zz.

Unknown said...

I liked the simulator. Great fun! But then again, I studied physics, so I have some idea of what I am doing. I am also a teacher. I think my students (who are in the range of 14-19 years old) would not be as charmed of this simulator as I am. When they capture a picture, all they see is lines (and since particle physics is not my specialty, sometimes the only things I saw were lines). The explanations offered were helpful for me, but I doubt my students know about selectrons. Its just a bunch of weird names for them.

I may use it, just to demonstrate an exciting tail about LHC, though. It looks great as a demonstration. But I don't think kids would like to play with it for very long. Still, who knows...

ZapperZ said...

If you do try it on your students, I would be very much interested to hear their reactions.

Zz.