Collider Triggers End-of-world Fears

[Papi]

Glitch shuts "Big Bang" collider for two months

Sun Sep 21, 2008 9:33pm IST

By Anne Richardson

GENEVA (Reuters) - A technical glitch has forced scientists to shut down the huge particle-smashing machine built to simulate the conditions of the "Big Bang" for at least two months, they said on Saturday.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said there had been a major helium leak on Friday into the tunnel housing the biggest and most complex machine ever made.

Just 10 days ago, scientists had celebrated the successful start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under the Swiss-French border, hoping it would revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.

In order to fix the problem, the machine will have to be warmed up from its operating temperature of minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit), spokesman James Gillies said.

"Because the LHC is a superconducting machine that works at very low temperatures, in order to get in and fix it we've got to warm it up, then we go and fix it, and then we cool it down again, and that's a process that's likely to take two months," he said.

The organization said strict safety regulations had ensured there was no risk to people from the malfunction.

The project has had to work hard to dismiss suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.

Since the machine started up earlier this month, scientists have successfully sent particle beams around the accelerator.

The next step will be to smash the beams into each other to trigger tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light.

This will be an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, the explosion generally believed by cosmologists to be at the origin of our expanding universe.

CERN said it thought the leak was prompted by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current, leading to mechanical failure.

When the LHC starts up at full speed, it will be able to engineer 600 million collisions every second between protons traveling around its 27-km (17-mile) underground chamber at 99.99[9999] percent of the speed of light.

CERN officials said minor glitches were to be expected, given the intricacy of the $9 billion machine.

"It's a very complicated machine, we've always known that there's the possibility of this sort of incident in the start-up phase and if it happens, then it's a two-month off time," said Gillies.

(Additional reporting by Michael Kahn; writing by Emma Thomasson)

http://in.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/...0080921?sp=true

[SaRpAnCh]

ha

[Papi]

What is so funny about a serious science experiment.

Teri tubelight kadi jagi ni lagdi :rolleyes:

[AvnitK]

the world didnt end lol

[Papi]

Large Hadron Collider to get helium leak warning system after breakdown

Official report says one tonne of liquid helium escaped through faulty connection, causing damage costing £20m to 53 magnets

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is to have an early warning system installed to guard against a repeat of the catastrophic fault that caused the world's largest atom-smasher to break down just days after it was switched on in September.

CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, is to fit the accelerator with 100 miles (160km) of cables and 2,000 crates of electronic monitors, so that engineers will be alerted to potentially hazardous abnormalities before they can cause serious damage.

The £4 billion “Big Bang machine”, which was switched on to global acclaim on September 10, was shut down just nine days later, after a huge helium leak caused extensive damage to many of its magnets.

The accelerator was then mothballed for repairs until next May or June, and its first experiments to investigate the fundamental nature of the Universe are not now scheduled to begin until July 2009 at the earliest.

The official report into the accident, published today, has confirmed that it was caused by a faulty connection between two of the LHC's superconducting magnets, which bend beams of particles around a 17-mile (27km) ring at close to the speed of light.

This led to the release of about a tonne of the liquid helium that cool the magnets to 1.8C above absolute zero. A build-up of pressure then caused further damage to many other magnets in the affected sector: inspections of 57 magnets have shown that 53 need to be replaced.

CERN officials have decided on two measures to prevent a similar mishap occurring in future. The early warning system will alert the control room to abnormal patterns of electrical resistance that could presage another accident. The magnet network will also be fitted with pressure-release valves, so that a fault in one need not damage its neighbours.

James Gillies, CERN's director of communications, said: “The report says we need to be installing a system to look for abnormal resistance along cables that might be a precursor to similar events, so that we can mitigate any damage.

“It also found that most of the damage did not occur in the actual incident, but afterwards, because the LHC was unable to release the extra pressure from the escaped helium. We are therefore also going to install pressure release systems in the magnets that bend the beam.”

The total bill for the repair will be approximately 35 million Swiss francs (£20 million), as anticipated by a preliminary investigation that finished last month. In addition, CERN will have to spend a further 10 million to 20 million Swiss Francs on replenishing the stock of spare magnets and parts used in the refit.

Dr Gillies said these costs could be met within the LHC's existing budget. “We will not be going to our member states asking for more money,” he said.

Of the 53 magnets that need to be replaced, 28 have already been brought to the surface, and all should have been removed by the end of the year. Two new magnets have already been installed, and all will have been replaced by the end of March.

The connections between the new magnets should be finished by May, allowing the LHC ring to begin powering up. A new beam should be inserted in July or August, allowing experiments to begin, though these will at first take place below the LHC's maximum power.

For the moment, new pressure release valves will be added to the dipole magnets that bend the LHC beam only in the three sectors that were warmed up to investigate and repair the fault. Similar devices will be installed in the LHC's other five sectors when these are warmed up for planned maintenance.

Dr Gillies said: “The mood here is very stoical. We would obviously have preferred that this hadn't happened, but it has and we are confident that we are going about fixing the problems the right way.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/s...icle5293931.ece

[Papi]

http://www.upi.com/S...36091252681093/

Scientists: Collider will produce results

GENEVA, Switzerland, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- The Large Hadron Collider will not become a "white elephant," despite having operated just one week in the year since its debut, scientists in Switzerland said.

The world's most powerful atom smasher began operation a year ago this month near Geneva amid great expectations it would recreate the conditions of the universe at its earliest infancy.

A week later, the more than $8 billion collider broke down. Scientists have spent the last year replacing super magnets and inspecting parts designed in a collaboration with as many as 2,000 scientists worldwide, said experimental physicist Edda Gschwendtner of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the group that developed the particale accelerator.

"This is really a flagship," Gschwendtner said, calling the collider both prototype and final product.

Gschwendtner and her team will start the collider again during the next two months, bringing it online at half speed with a belief it will function at full capacity, in time, collider spokesman James Gillies told Swissinfo.ch in a story published Friday.

"It's not going to become a white elephant," Gillies said.

[Papi]

http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/8309875.stm

LHC gets colder than deep space

By Paul Rincon

Science reporter, BBC News

The giant Atlas detector will search for hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

The magnets are arranged end-to-end in a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border.

The cool-down is an important milestone ahead of the collider's scheduled re-start in the latter half of November.

The LHC has been shut down since 19 September 2008, when a magnet problem called a "quench" caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the LHC tunnel.

After the accident, the particle accelerator had to be warmed up so that repairs could take place.

The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang. It is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), based in Geneva.

Two beams of protons will be fired down pipes running through the magnets. These beams will travel in opposite directions around the main "ring" at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, smashing into one another with cataclysmic energy. Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, revealing fundamental new insights into the nature of the cosmos.

Awesome energy

The operating temperature of the LHC is just a shade above "absolute zero" (-273.15C) - the coldest temperature possible. By comparison, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is about 2.7 kelvin (-270C; -454F).

The LHC's magnets are designed to be "superconducting", which means they channel electric current with zero resistance and very little power loss. But to become superconducting, the magnets must be cooled to very low temperatures.

For this reason, the LHC is innervated by a complex system of cryogenic lines using liquid helium as the refrigerant of choice.

No particle physics facility on this scale has ever operated in such frigid conditions.

But before a beam can be circulated around the 27km-long LHC ring, engineers will have to thoroughly test the machine's new quench protection system and continue with magnet powering tests.

Particle beams have already been brought "to the door" of the Large Hadron Collider. A low-intensity beam could be injected into the LHC in as little as a week.

This beam test would involve only parts of the collider, rather than the whole "ring".

The LHC's tunnel runs for 27km under the Franco-Swiss border

Officials now plan to circulate a beam around the LHC in the second half of November. Engineers will then aim to smash low-intensity beams together, giving scientists their first data.

The beams' energy will then be increased so that the first high-energy collisions can take place. These will mark the real beginning of the LHC's research programme.

Collisions at high energy have been scheduled to occur in December, but now look more likely to happen in January, according to Cern's director of communications James Gillies.

Feeling the squeeze

Mr Gillies said this would involve delicate operation of the accelerator.

"Whilst you're accelerating [the beams], you don't have to worry too much about how wide the beams are. But when you want to collide them, you want the protons as closely squeezed together as possible.

He added: "If you get it wrong you can lose beam particles - so it can take a while to perfect. Then you line up the beams to collide.

"In terms of the distances between the last control elements of the LHC and the collision point, it's a bit like firing knitting needles from across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way."

Officials plan a brief hiatus over the Christmas and New Year break, when the lab will have to shut down.

Although managers had discussed working through this period, Mr Gillies said this would have been "too logistically complicated".

The main determinant in the decision to close over winter were workers' contracts, which would have needed to be re-negotiated, he said.

An upgraded early warning system, or quench protection system, should prevent incidents of the kind which shut the collider last year, officials say.

This has involved installing hundreds of new detectors around the machine.

Cern has spent about 40m Swiss Francs (£24m) on repairs following the accident, including upgrades to the quench protection system.

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.u

[Papi]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3AzD9W1oE

[Papi]

http://www.theglobea...article1375662/

Atom smasher bounces back

Alexander G. Higgins

Geneva — Associated Press Published on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 12:17PM EST Last updated on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 12:21PM EST

The world's largest atom smasher used its accelerator today to speed up proton beams for the first time as scientists moved ahead in efforts to learn more about the universe.

The $10 billion (U.S.) Large Hadron Collider showed it could raise the energy of the proton beams whizzing around the massive machine by an initial 20 per cent. "It was just a preliminary test," said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. "It's all going very well."

Today's step indicated further good news for the collider since months of repairs following its spectacular collapse last year. The latest phase began Friday night when the first proton beams circulated each way around the 27-kilometre tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

The operators then got the beams to run simultaneously in opposite directions through fire-hose-sized pipes 11,000 times a second around the ring, zooming by at nearly the speed of light through temperatures colder than outer space.

Ultimately, the collider aims to create conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.

On Monday, the collider's four massive detectors saw the first collisions between protons as the beams crossed each other at set points in rooms the size of cathedrals 100 metres underground.

Physicists say the beam is of superb quality, with the protons tightly packed into hair-like lines and guided by 1,600 superconducting magnets — some of them 15 metres long — around the ring.

While the initial collisions were a side effect, intentional hits could begin within the next 10 days, mainly to check how the machine is working, Mr. Gillies said. The initial collisions are needed to calibrate the machine.

Mr. Gillies said the energy of the proton beam was increased to 540 from 450 billion electron volts, still a long way from the power that will be needed for new discoveries in the makeup of the universe and matter. Those discoveries might start happening in the first half of next year.

"They set in process the procedure to ramp the machine up to the 1.2 TeV (trillion electron volts) that we want to get to this year," Mr. Gillies said.

That level would make the Geneva machine the world's most powerful collider, overtaking the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, which operates at 1 trillion electron volts.

The Geneva accelerator automatically stopped when it rose to about 540 billion electron volts, about 90 billion electron volts higher than it had been operating so far, Mr. Gillies said.

After that, the proton beam was halted for maintenance checks on the machine, he said.

The collider's first science test will take place in January or early February, when scientists plan to start deliberately crashing protons into each other to see what they can discover about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.

Physicists said the discoveries could begin after the collider reaches 3.5 TeV in each direction.

The collider was started with great fanfare Sept. 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It took 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted. The overall price of repairs and improvements is expected to cost $40 million, according to CERN.

The long-term goal, after more modifications, will be to run the proton beams at 7 TeV in each direction — with seven times the energy for collisions that is available at Fermilab.

The higher the energy and the greater the number of protons in the beam, the more likely it will be that the scientists will discover particles and forces.

"It depends on how kind nature is to us," said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer.

Still, it could take several years before the collider discovers the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that theoretically gives mass to other subatomic particles — and thus everything in the universe, said physicist Tejinder S. Virdee.

That is because the Higgs boson is believed to be hard to see and needs powerful energy to be revealed.