Today I Found Out What Will Happen if You Stick Your Head Inside a Particle Accelerator

If you have ever followed @lemouth blog here on steemit, you will know he writes a lot on particle physics and of course the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is a particle accelerator.

The @steemstem group even paid a visit to the CERN's accelerator complex two months ago.

Just in case you have not been following his blog, I will explain in brief what that was. The LHC is one of the most massive projects built by humankind in their quest to unravel the mysteries of our universe.

The LHC is a programme built by CERN ( European Organisation for Nuclear Research). It is a collaboration of more than 100 countries with over 10,000 scientists and engineers. The collider is one of the most complex experimental programmes in the world; the LHC project kicked off on September 10, 2008.

The LHC spans a mind-boggling 27-kilometre ring which comprises of superconducting magnets and other things which enable the accelerating nature of collider as it injects energy on the particles as it travels along it.

Now that we have a fair idea of what the collider is all about, how about we take a peep at what will happen if we decide to poke our heads into one?

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A Magnetic Voyage

The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator; it incites sub-atomic particles to accelerate at tremendous speeds. Guiding the particles down the tunnels are electric and magnetic field set up via the walls of the tube. The tunnel walls are akin to the barrels of the gun that guides the bullet (sub-atomic particles) and control its speed and direction.

The LHC contains 1232 dipoles and 506 quadrupole magnets to create a magnetic that is up to 8.3 Tesla which is 100,000 greater than the Earth's magnetic field.

These powerful electromagnets are needed to direct the speeding particles through the path if it were absent the particles would tend to move in a straight line.

Therefore the protons and electrons accelerate at speeds close to the speed of light. Our dear Einstein, in his theory of relativity, made us know that no particles that have mass could move as fast as the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

The particles in the LHC travel at 0.999997828 times the speed of light at injection (energy = 450 GeV) and 0.999999991 c, i.e. 0.999999991 times the speed of light at top energy (energy = 7000 GeV).

But the particles still move at an energy close to the speed of light, the energy the LHC currently produce is 6.5TeV per beam which has the capability of pushing the particles around the 27km tunnels 11,245 times per second.

1 tera elctron volts = 1,000,000,000,000 electron Volts or 10¹² electron Volts

1 Tera electron volt (1 TeV) is similar to the energy produced by the motion of a flying mosquito.

LHC can squeeze energy into the space which is a million million times smaller than that of a mosquito.

If someone is brave enough, or foolish enough, depending on the side you look at it, to stick his head inside the accelerator, a proton moving at that rate is capable of killing you a couple of thousand times over.

But recall the particle collider was not set up for the inquisitive person to stick the head inside. Instead, it was set up to gain more knowledge on the building blocks of matter and possibly get more understanding of how the universe came into existence (the creation).

It's like Space

Inside the LHC is a vacuum that is just like the interstellar space with all its emptiness. We do not want some odd gas particles interrupting the particles as they speed along their merry way. Not only the vacuum helps the particles, in the case of the cryomagnets, but the vacuum also serves as an insulator that keeps the heat away.

So we have the biggest "operational vacuum in the world" inside the LHC with its impressive 10^-6 mbar of insulating vacuum.

Now, imagine your head inside such a vacuum. Within 10 to 15 seconds you will be unconscious. That is right; there will be no air to breathe which leads to starving the brain of oxygen. The absence of pressure will make the blood vessels near the surface to break especially around the eyes. The saliva on your tongue will bubble as that which happened to NASA spacesuit technician, Jim LeBlanc, when his spacesuit malfuncutioned during vacuum test on December 14, 1966.

“As I stumbled backwards, I could feel the saliva on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious and that’s the last thing I remember,” recalls LeBlanc. ^{Huffinton Post}

It's Cold in Here

Oh, I almost forgot about the temperature inside. For everything to work so nicely, the temperature is lowered to the frigid temperature of -271.3°C or 1.9 Kelvin. In other to achieve superconductivity (flow of electricity with almost zero resistance) the temperatures must be super low.

The liquid-helium circuit has got this covered, but your head stuck inside has not. Therefore we will have your head turned into a popsicle before anyone could spell Jack Robinson.

You may survive for teeny much longer if the other factors are not taken into consideration.

A Bullet Speed

Two protons at full energy have the energy which is equal to that of a 400-tonne train similar to the French TGV high-speed trains moving at 150 km/h. This energy is enough to liquidate 500 kilogrammes of copper.

Each beam absorber known as beam dump absorber is a 7m long carbon-graphite cylinder which is 700mm in diameter housed in a steel container.

The water-cooled material is surrounded by about 750 tonnes of iron and concrete shielding. For the sake of discussion, let's assume you still have your head and you are alive and well like the man below.

But Someone Did It!

Yes, some did stick his head into a particle accelerator. But it was not intentional and not on the more powerful accelerator- the LHC.

The man's name is Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, a Russian scientist who at that time was a scientist at the Institute of High Energy Physics.

The energy accelerator is the U-70 Synchrotron. On July 13, 1978, he stuck his head inside the accelerator to check on malfunctioning hardware and got a zap for his troubles.

The machine due to a failed safety mechanism someone energised and sent a proton through his head! It was a painless entry, and Bugorski only knew he was in trouble when his face swelled to about twice its size.

His head surprisingly absorbed 2000 gray of the ionising beam when 5 grays could prove fatal.

He did not die and is alive today after celebrating his 75th year this year.

But it did not leave him scar-free; the beam did not affect his intellect as he finished his PhD after this accident. Instead, it left a part of his face paralysed and the other part "frozen" or unchanged as it was thirty-something odd years back when the accident occurred. Talk about the vampire effect; he had not aged a day in that part of the face.

Conclusion

I know we all want to live forever young, but try as much as we can not to stick our heads in a particle accelerator if we happen to visit one.

Thank you for reading.

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^REFERENCES

• ^{Superconducting Electromagnet}
• ^{A vacuum as empty as interstellar space}
• ^{FAQ:CERN Brochure}
• ^{LHC Layout}
• ^{LHC Beam Dumps}
• ^{What happens when you stick your head into a particle accelerator}

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