Latest Large Hadron Collider Technical Setbacks

Large Hadron Collider (LHC), deemed a super scientific machine, manned by a brigade of scientists (read: super brain power) and costing over 8 billion dollars and 20 years in the making, stopped dead in its tracks. But fears not, for the scientists, it is probably a common and expected setbacks.

The same scenario may also applied in the blogging world. Regardless of the planning you made, the money that you have spent, time that you have spend, things may not work according to your plan.

Just like the LHC scientists, you must prepare for the worst and have a backup plan or fallback plan. And keep your cool, too.




From eFluxMedia: Helium Leak Shuts Down LHC For Two Months

After last week’s transformer failure, a new hardware malfunction has stopped the LHC dead in its tracks. This time, the electrical link between two of the particle accelerator’s massive 30-ton superconducting magnets has failed, causing a magnet quench event. Due to having to warm up the section of the tunnel containing the magnet in order to conduct repairs, and then cool it back down to its -271°C operating temperature, these repairs will take at least two months.

Technical setbacks have plagued the Large Hadron Collider ever since it was started on September the 10th, including a transformer failure which shut down its cooling plant, which was only repaired on Thursday. Immediately afterwards, on Friday, during a test, one of the bus bar connections which linked cables between the magnets failed, and melted thus causing roughly a ton of liquid helium to leak into one of the tunnel sections. The fire brigade had to be called to handle the situation. "It seems to be a badly made connection – but this all has to be confirmed once we have had the chance to take a look at it," said James Gillies, director of communications at CERN.

The rather large dipole magnets that are used to steer protons around the Large Hadron Collider’s circular tract, are superconductive. What this means is that scientists have taken advantage of a property of matter by which its electrical resistance is lowered to naught when cooled very close to absolute zero. This allows much more current to be passed through the magnets, giving them much more force in steering the supercharged particles, which can run at up to 7 terra-electron-volts.

Non-superconductive magnets simply would not be strong enough to handle the proton beams, which would steer off-track, hitting the collider pipe walls. These particles, at such energy levels, can melt through several feet of steel in nanoseconds, so you don’t want those out of control.

Getting the magnets to and out of such low temperatures however – colder than outer space – takes a while however, and were it not required to use superconducting magnets, the repairs would only take a few days. This way, it will at least take two months, dangerously narrowing the window of opportunity in which to conduct the collision tests. This is because the LHC facility shuts down during the winter to save on energy costs. If they don’t get the problem fixed by then, there won’t be any collision until 2009.

CERN physicists are not very worried though, and are calling this an expected setback as the LHC, which is arguably the most complex machine ever built, has been in construction for 20 years and has so far cost more than $8 billion, and such hitches have been very probable since the beginning.

"If you keep an eye on the big picture, we've been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process," said Gillies, who went on to say that "A year or two down the line, this moment will be a distant memory, and we'll be running smoothly."

The LHC’s Gala Inauguration party, set for October 21, will still take place, according to Dr. Gillies.

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From TECH.BLORGE: LHC stopped with electrical problems

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in its teething phase also known as commissioning phase. While the commissioning seemed to be going well last week and was actually ahead of schedule, this week everything came to a screeching halt on Wednesday due to an electrical problem.

If you will recall, last week we reported on the hacking of computer systems that occurred when CERN turned the LHC on to begin the commissioning of the large "atom smasher". The scientists caught fought off the hackers and were deleting inserted code.

This week, as reported by CERN, the LHC ran into a problem when one of the cooling systems required for one of the very large magnets was not working properly.

The intervening time [September12-18] has been spent recovering cryogenic conditions after the failure of a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC switched off the main compressors of the cryogenics for two sectors of the machine. The transformer, weighing 30 tonnes and with a rating of 12 MVA, was exchanged over the weekend. During this process, the cryogenics system was put into a standby mode with the two sectors kept at around 4.5 K. Since the beginning of the week the cryogenics team have been busy re-cooling the magnets and preparing for operation with beam, which is currently forecast for today[September 18,2008].

With the cooling system not working properly, the particle stream that is directed by the magnets could go off course and wind up slamming into the wall of the Collider rather than streaming in a circle as needed.

Eventually two particle streams will race around the LHC in opposite directions in order to smash into each other in an attempt to decipher the origins of the solar system. These particle streams will be moving at just under the speed of light. So far CERN has succeeded in sending a particle stream in each direction.

The failure of the cooling system and magnets due to an electrical issue could have devastating effects on the LHC and derail the program indefinitely. As reported at Geek.com:

If the steering magnets failed during full speed operation, the force of the protons would hit the pipe walls with the force of an aircraft carrier traveling near 40 MPH.

Ouch! An impact like that do some major damage. Since it has taken 20 years and "six billion Swiss francs (3.76 billion euros, 5.46 billion dollars)" to build this 17 mile long super collider, having an electrical failure derail the experiments and potentially damage the infrastructure would be a nightmare.

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From Hack In The Back: LHC Shut Down Because of Electrical Fault

The world's largest particle collider was stopped on Wednesday, a week after its startup, as a result of an electrical fault, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Thursday.

The problem affected a cooling system for high-powered magnets designed to steer beams of particles around the Large Hadron Collider's 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel, CERN said. The LHC "is still in commissioning phase, it's a very complex tool and it's normal for there to be stoppages," a CERN spokeswoman told AFP.

Commissioning work stopped on Wednesday, but was likely to resume later Thursday, she said. The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs (3.76 billion euros, 5.46 billion dollars) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.

Part of the commissioning process is to find and work out the kinks before you actually start using the equipment for experiments. With equipment this large and complex, having problems like an electrical glitch is expected. CERN expected the equipment to be up and running yesterday. The next update on the LHC will be September 24th so we will see then if the equipment was able to resume the commissioning process as scheduled.

If so, then the first collision of the two particle beams should be just a few weeks from now.

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From Universe Today: Transformer Glitch Halts LHC Operations

According to reports, only a day after the first successful circulation of protons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last week, operations at the world's largest particle accelerator had to be stopped due to a fault with a 30 tonne transformer used to cool part of the facility. The protons were not being accelerated at the time and there was no risk to safety at the LHC.

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From SOFTPEDIA: New Glitches for the LHC
Electrical problem caused the temporary interruption of the experiment

Only a week after it had been started, LHC, world's biggest particle smasher, had to be stopped on Wednesday because of an electrical fault, as CERN officially announces.

The recent failures of the LHC staff haven't even been forgotten yet, and a new one comes to increase the world's doubts related to the functioning and the outcome of this whole universe-understanding event. At this level of experiment magnitude, device dimensions and international scientists' implication, failures should not be an option. The people involved – some of the smartest in the world, as they say, at least in the fields associated to the endeavor – should have everything covered, fixed and prepared before launching any test. But it seems this is not the case.