LHC@home
LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider. It will be the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which is being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. When it will switch on in 2008, it will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate particle proprieties.
LHC@home helps the construction of LHC. It simulates how the particles travel trough the 27 km long tunnel. With the help of the calculated information, the magnets that control the beam can be calibrated with greater precision.
Since 2004, LHC@home has been distributing the programme Sixtrack which supports accelerator physicists simulating the proton beam stability of the future Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There are plans to distribute a second software package, Garfield, which does simulations of gases in high fields, to simulate the behaviour of particle detectors used at the LHC.
Since 2004, LHC@home has been running on Windows and Linux machines, but we are keen to extend it to other platforms in the near future, with the help of the tester communities, if possible. (A graphics package for a Linux screensaver was even developed by one of the LHC@home users - thank you, Roberto Virga!).
The Windows screensaver portrays a set of particles, similar to those being simulated in the programme. Their motion is at present defined by an algorithm that is independent of SixTrack, although there are plans for a version of the screensaver that will display the actual cross-section of the beam of particles that SixTrack is simulating.
Applications available are:
- SixTrack:
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- Linux/x86
- Windows/x86
- Windows/x86_64
- Linux/x86_64
- Garfield:
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- Linux/x86
- Windows/x86