Thursday, July 15, 2004

You need ATLAS!

"During construction of the lab's five-storey tall ATLAS instrument, which is soon to be used to search for an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, a precise optical system was used to align the silicon detectors used to monitor the trajectory of subatomic particles.

By modifying the instrument and passing it above the grooves used to store audio on vinyl, the researchers were able to visually record their position to an accuracy of a one thousandth of a millimetre.

Furthermore, algorithms used to strip away background noise from particle data proved an effective way to clean up scratches and other flaws on the vinyl. This image of the grooves was then fed into a "virtual" record player to recreate the original sound."

Phew, my vinyl is safe...so how much is one of these then?!

Jon 1:53 PM Permalink

Comments:

I had friends working on ATLAS. My mate Steve was working on the optical link to get data out of the detector (because copper wires weren't fast enough), but it had to be mega radiation hardened to withstand the particle pounding!

See, who said particle physics was good for nothing!?

posted by Blogger James : 5:17 PM

Ah, the old particle pounding problem... I think I showed Steve the optical link solution? ;)

posted by Blogger Jonathan : 8:57 AM

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