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.

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.

via Physorg.com, Geek.com and CERN

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Entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 8:38 pm under Science and technology, Technology.

Read more entries by Susan Wilson.
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