Disadvantages Of Hadron Collider

What are some of the potential dangers of the Large Hadron Collider?

The first and foremost fear is the creation of miniature black holes. Imaging our beloved planet suddenly turning into something the size of a tennis ball. Doesn't sound very appealingly, does it?Even though it sounds scary, in reality, it doesn't happen. First if all the energy required to create miniature black holes is enormous. That is, LHC currently operates at Tev scale. Whereas, cosmic ray particles sometimes hits the upper atmosphere at energies that are a million times more than what LHC generates. And they've never created a single black hole!!!Then we have Hawking radiation. All black holes are said to evaporate over time because of hawking radiation. And according to calculations, mini black holes tend to evaporate instantaneously due to hawking radiation. So again, ignore the naysayers.The second is the power of the LHC beam. It's only a few microns thick, but mind-bendingly powerful when compared to that of a laser. Meaning, if you cross the beam, your body will be very cleanly sliced into two. Like a knife through very soft butter. So, when the beam is active, its better to stay away.Third, there's fear that the collisions are very powerful that it might rip the very fabric of spacetime itself at the point of impact. We still do not know what happens when there's a rip in spacetime. But we can assume it can be catastrophic. But that fear is unfounded as billions & billions of high energy collisions occur all across our planet at all times & nothing happens. And the fun fact is, even if something happens, we'll never know!!!

What are the limitations of the Large Hadron Collider?

The two limitations are its maximum energy and the number of collision events that can be recorded every second.A collision can only produce particles less than or equal to the combined energy of the two particle beams, with a higher likelihood of producing more lower-energy particles than fewer high-energy particles. It’s possible, likely even, that there are as-yet undiscovered particles or variants of known particles at higher energies than are currently produced by the LHC. The LHC is currently very close to its theoretical maximum, in order to produce more energetic collisions they may need to create a collider that’s much bigger, possibly meaning they’d either have to build it in orbit, or on the Moon.The LHC currently produces 600 million collisions per second with each collision producing about 1MB of raw data. If they were to record all the raw data and store it for later processing they’d have to be able to transmit and record 600 TB/s. When the LHC was first built such a data throughput was impossible, these days it’s merely not feasible, therefore the detectors were designed to to some very low-level filtering to discard uninteresting collision events making the actual data rate more like 25 GB/s. This data is then further filtered so that the data being stored is a little more than 1 GB/s. While it’s still not feasible to store all the raw data, they can certainly upgrade the system with more modern technology to improve that rate. This is what they’re currently doing.

Are the data processing demands (computation, storage, latency) of LHC experiments at CERN higher than the demands of other large-scale industrial/scientific projects?

Yes and no. Most on-detector electronics are custom-made to fit the requirements of the detector.Many things that are done online (like taking decisions at 40 MHz with 3 μs latency) implies usage of custom-programmed electronics. After that, hardware is usually sourced from the outside though software remains largely customized, even if common frameworks exist.And the phone I am writing this in is perfectly COTS.

Instead of a circular particle collider like the LHC at CERN, why don't they make the particle collider a spiral, where a beam comes from the top and the bottom, and then collides halfway down?

What possible advantage would such an arrangement have over two linear accelerators, forming a linear collider?A linear accelerator itself is not at all ideal for accelerating protons to such energies as the LHC achieves. Such an arrangement would have many disadvantages, at the required scale, far too many disadvantages to begin to list them all.Just for a start: the LHC was built in the pre-existing and circular tunnel that was dug for LEP. This tunnel is about 17 miles around and between 50 and 150 meters underground. They didn’t want, at CERN, to dig a new tunnel, because that is an extremely costly undertaking. They didn’t have a “spiral” tunnel, and if they had asked to build one, then people would have rightly said: Why the hell for? Why would you or anyone else ever want to do that? Have you all gone completely crazy?The LHC accelerates two counter-rotating beams (rather two sets of bunches) of protons or heavy ions, in approximate circles inside a very large circular tunnel. It achieves the high energies and currents that it does by sending the particle bunches through the exact same RF cavities many, many, many times, as they circulate, each time adding a little more energy to the beam, and constantly increasing the dipole magnetic field so that the beams stay in the same circle and don’t ever hit the outside of the beam pipes.It’s a very delicate, very carefully engineered process.The LHC is a very highly optimized, superconducting, alternating gradient, strong focusing synchrotron. It is exactly what the physics they wanted to explore with it called for. The only better machine would have been the SSC which unfortunately was cancelled in a very short-sighted decision of the US government in the early 1990’s, and it was also a circular accelerator of the same basic type as the LHC.Believe me: the designers knew very well exactly what they were doing when they built the LHC.