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A comment on If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider.... Parent comment

Re:If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider... by sbierwagen on Saturday September 25, 2010 @07:07AM (#1726737)
The beam path on the LHC is kept under high vacuum. At no point does it intersect air at atmospheric pressure. There's no way for anything to accidentally intersect the beams, which is good, since one of them is made of antimatter.

EDIT: Nope! Wrong! Mistook the LHC for the LEP. The LHC does not accelerate antimatter at any point.

Additionally, while the individual protons in the LHC may only be a hundred times more energetic, there are quite a few more total particles in the beams. I can't find any technical details of the U-70 synchrotron, but it came online in 1957, so there's that.

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Re:If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider... by fjh on Saturday September 25, 2010 @07:46AM (#1726775)
Sorry about the nitpick, but no, the LHC does not use antimatter. Both beams consist of protons (or heavy ions sometimes). Some of the accelerators at CERN, like the LEP (Large Electron Positron) Collider, do use antimatter, but the LHC does not.
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Re:If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider... by sbierwagen on Saturday September 25, 2010 @07:52AM (#1726783)
Thanks for the correction. Upvoted.
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