The Amazing Tevatron!!!

So the other day I saw a status update come across my news feed on Facebook from my good friend The Tevatron that read:

Cap'n Tevatron: Store 7247 terminated intentionally after delivering 6900 nb^-1. Pacific Ocean earthquakes caused observable magnet motion.

This made my jaw drop!!! To understand what this means the average reader will need a little bit of background.

What is a Tevatron?

The Tevatron is the name given to the 4 mile long circular particle accelerator located at Fermi National Labs in Batavia, Il and is currently (as of 10/12/09)  the worlds highest energy particle collider. What the Tevatron does is create proton and anti-proton beams that circulate in opposite directions at speeds of ~99.99% the speed of light (2 TeV center of mass energy) and cause them to collilde at two different detectors located around the ring.

If it wasn't amazing enough to take things smaller than an atom and trap them into a space less then a millimeter across and then collide speed them up to near the speed of light (186,000 miles/hour) and then collide them to within a few centimeters of the center of TWO three story detectors...imagine doing all of this with magnets that are 8 times more powerful than the entire Earth's magnetic field requiring a power supply of a small town!!! No small task.

Magnets at the Tevatron

Now, how do we see an earthquake that happens on the other side of the world using these magnets. Well the piece of information you need to know to understand this is that these giant magnets we use at the Tevatron have to be cooled to really cold temperatures in order to allow them to reach the power we need to create the magnetic fields of the right strength. How cold is that...around -450 degrees Fahrenheit. When you are dealing with spaces smaller than a millimeter and temperatures that cold...any and all vibrations matter! So how do you detect and control these vibrations...how else, you put a level on whatever it is you built and measure and try to correct for these vibrations.


Ok, now it is a little more complicated than that...but not too much more detailed. So on each of these magnets to measure the vibrations and losses due to this is a level-of-sorts. This is what they use to detect the earthquakes. Basically, the control room notices that they are losing some protons or anti-protons because the magnets are moving changing the orbit of the particles. They check their levels, compare with any known earthquakes that may have happened on the earth...do a little physics and math...and compare to see if the observed motion matches where and when the earthquake occurs. Amazingly they do and this isn't the first time they've observed this...in 2006 (see plot below) they observed the same thing 

Obviously, they try to correct when the orbit starts to stray...but the time frame that the earthquake wave passes is very small and the correction software must adjust at some regular time interval. So even though it is rare to see these earthquakes...taking them into account and correcting for them is important.

Needless to say...THIS IS INCREDIBLE THAT WE CAN DO THIS!