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Serious Magnet Failure at CERN's New Accelerator
GrepNut writes "CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab." While safety precautions were followed, and no one was injured nor were any rifts in the space-time continuum opened, it's still a rather large setback for the project.
The part was destroyed and subsequently compressed into a singularity by the black hole that the device created.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
It's John Tidor's fault!
nearlygod
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
But all credit cards within a 10-mile radius were erased.
Scientists: Muhahahaha, that will teach those Europeans.
...and make sure there aren't any redshirts around the next time you install it.
I sure am glad you signed your post, because after reading such an unintelligent, innate statement, I lost so many IQ points that I forgot who made it.
How many time do I have to tell you: Don't cross the streams!
Where would someone called Oddone work if not at a place that creates black holes.
Precautions must be taken to prevent an event that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the ENTIRE universe. Granted, that's a worst case scenario. The destruction may be limited to merely our own galaxy.
I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone cause one!
Hmm.... sounds nasty.
Each of the ~1200 superconducting magnets is about 50 foot long. There's a photo here showing one being put in place (March 2005):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7119458/
And now an AC trolling. Truly all the wonder has gone out of the world!
"The failure does not concern the magnets or the cold masses themselves, but rather their assembly in the cryostat."
I know we don't read TFA here, but is it too much for the submitter to get past the first paragraph.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Ya, tell me what nation could have developed "Star Wars" the first time. In fact, you mention Challenger and Hubble. What other nations routinely put people or telescopes into space at all?
"I am serious. And please don't call me Shirley."
...they're going to boost the mass spectrometer to 105% (for the extra resolution). It should be fine just so long as they follow standard insertion procedure...but you don't need to know that - everything will be fine.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
But yes, lots of things were done inefficiently.
Globalisation means that anyone with a big enough budget can do pretty much everything mankind is capable of.
Help me Gordon Freeman!
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Fermilab has built electromagnets for many particle accelerators, including SLAC. They are apparently the only source. If you want something else, you have to go to TDK in Japan for fixed-intensity ceramic magnets.
According to an old neighborhood buddy of mine who is at SLAC, when he was in redesign of the linear accelerator in the 80s, those were the only two bids. For flexibility, they went with Fermi and electromagnets.
And they haven't failed yet.
While we're whining about cars, you can't keep headlamps and taillamps in a VW, wiring issues burn 'em out. nobody's perfect. that's why you negotiate warranties in the contracts for stuff.
no wonder you don't dare sign your name. which, BTW, is quite imperfect in itself. Can't stand on the courage of your convulsions, as a rabid right-wing wacko radio commenter used to say.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"...research associate Gordon Freeman pushes a crystalline specimen into the beam of an over-charged anti-mass spectrometer, the experiment triggers a resonance cascade, which causes severe structural damage to the entire facility and severs communications with the outside world, and within much of the facility itself..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Research_F acility#.22The_Black_Mesa_Incident.22
God does not want us to dig a hole into His universe! that's why the new accelerator will never work!
At least when NASA has a problem, they photograph it and show it to the readers. The lack of pictures, interviews, and names in the CERN press release is incredible. It is quite a different culture than we're used to.
...resonance cascade failure! :-)
The article seems to place the full blame on Fermilab's poor design. I will withhold judgement until all the facts are known. Did CERN provide specific requirements for asymetric load bearing capacity? If there were no requirements provided to Fermilab, then it would seem to me to be a problem at the CERN end.
I think the 2+ miles under the harbor was actually the most trivial part of the project, being completed well ahead of and opened earlier than the rest of the project. The real challenge was building the new underground roads and associated bridges, ramps etc. while keeping the existing transportation infrastructure operational (albeit in a limited form). They had to deal with building close to existing subway tunnels, dealing with soil that was all landfill, and hitting archaeological sites. The project was certainly wrought with corruption, but to imply that it was somehow inefficient by comparing the length of the roads developed makes little sense.
Oooo, a troll! Gotta get me bow and arrow and fryin' pan! Now where's the olive oil....
"What were they thinking contracting one of the most important components to Americans?"
Fermilab for some time stayed on top of the accelerator game (if they've ever really lost it) because their magnets made up for the radius/distance difference. Fermilab essentially builds the strongest magnets for these sorts of applications. The Europeans going to them was smart; they went to the best.
"It's just becoming an American tradition post-Challenger/Hubble/Star Wars that you got paid to do it multiple times until you get it right."
You are equating a construction project with unionized workers with high end particle physics testing and design that pushes the envelope.
The oversight was just that--an oversight. People do make mistakes, and unexpected things do happen. You are certainly not a scientist, because you'd know that most experiments have mistakes in them that are corrected later; the bigger the project, the more costly and noticeable the error, but they happen in all areas--you just don't hear about some bad gel run because it's not "news."
Should the oversight have been caught? Probably. But it seems to me that asymmetrical load testing not being performed should have been caught by anyone reviewing the paperwork of tests performed, and I'd be shocked if people on both sides of the Atlantic didn't have access to the tests done, and BOTH missed it.
One thing physicists certainly do care about besides results is something analogous--reputation. The Fermilab people are probably the most disappointed and shocked of the bunch, and all parties feel this--the Fermilab people because they built and tested the magnets, the CERN folks because they didn't check the paperwork carefully and the setback.
"Don't these people know the 6+ mile Boston "Big Dig" with only 2+ miles under the harbor has so-far cost almost as much as the 31-mile Chunnel?"
Yeah, because digging under the city with all the infrastructure above and nearby including property buyouts is similar to digging under the English Channel. Digging 2 tunnels is analogous to building a huge multilane vehicle passthrough. Building with reusable patented protected tunnel diggers essentially large face milling heads with minimum labor labor is akin to digging with conventional digging equipment.
Damn man, the two digging/tunnel projects aren't even analagous in the construction discipline, and you're bringing it up to a high end physics project MAGNET failure?
Yum, fried troll.
The interesting part of the article was that the cryostat design was reviewed by CERN personnel, so the issue of asymmetric loading on the cryostat was overlooked by more than just Fermilab. Sounds like and "Oh shit - nobody thunk of that" moment.
so why wasn't this tagged "ha ha" ?
The forces induced in these magnets during a quench is obscene. Given the size of the LHC, I would guess that these are the largest such magnets ever fabricated. When pushing the envelope so hard, failures are going to happen. It amazes me that the public's quality expectations are so high for such work. If Windows was built to the same standards, it would have uptimes measured in centuries.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Oh hey wow, I didn't realize that somebody could reply to their own post until you did it just now.
It's not my goddamn planet monkey boy!
I'll see you in hell Bucharoo Bonzai!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I am imagining that just before failure the fellow at the controls was muttering...
... She canna take much more of this, Captain"
"I'm Giving Her All She's Got, Captain
...is wrong. Should be the "Oh Sh*t!" department. Seems like the same kind of situation as when the Hubble Telescope was launched with the bad mirror and it's likely just as bad news for the forward progress of scientific knowledge. Says the article: "failure to account for the asymmetric loads in the engineering design of the magnet appears to be a likely cause..."
Sounds like it is a big problem, not a small one.
funny story!
Did anyone else read that as hardon collider?
Globalisation means that anyone with a big enough budget can do pretty much everything mankind is capable of.
It also means never having to say you're sorry.
Mainly because it opens up a whole new class of other people to blame when it goes bad
But to be serious; in this case it looks like a case of overlooking a possible engineering problem. It's quite understandable, as things of this nature present some unique and new problems and sometimes present gotchas that only sometimes gets caught in time. The Huygens Titan Probe almost wound up being a very expensive paperweight until a single engineer caught on that the doppler shift of the radio signals might need to be compensated for. Hubble's main mirror wound up being ground incorrectly due to some chipped coating on an end cap of the null corrector and lack of testing. Other space probes, and some very specialized machinery in other fields, weren't lucky enough to have an engineer catch the gotcha in time.
The problems become obvious with hindsight but are understandably hard to forsee, simply because these sorts of things have either never been done before or are at a whole new order of scale and complexity. Some turn out to be simple bone-headed mistakes but most are, "We never even thought of that!" That sort of thing is truly global.
A very close friend of mine worked for 30 years at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center designing their guidance system mangets. I don't think SLAC had any such problems.
It's the Doctor, paying a visit.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Anyone else reminded of the video game Out of this World when they read this?
*pines for the days of playing video games*
Brian Greene and his army of staunch string theorists realized their idea would be disproven and the Higgs would not be found, so they sabotaged the project to save their government funding.
Don't these people know the 6+ mile Boston "Big Dig" with only 2+ miles under the harbor has so-far cost almost as much as the 31-mile Chunnel?
Hrm, maybe that has something to do with that the Chunnel is 2 miles of interesting parts and 29 miles of a simple tunnel? Not to mention that the Big Dig was a complete renovation of an old infrastructure while keeping the city running at the same time.
that this thing can be refurbished and used as a chick magnet? I'm sure there are not a few /.ers that could use such a service.
Interesting how this came out just a day after the ATLAS software and computing meetings in Munich concluded. I bet there are some interesting discussions happening there right now among the attendees that are still in town.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
It's on a news site in the science section !
WTF ?Can't find your car keys?
Try looking in Switzerland!
Hey this is supposed to work in Europe...how many blonds are working on the site? Better use carbon nanotube superconductors next time! Better yet some nanotubes in the structure. Stonger than steel you know.
The researcher tasked with inputting The Numbers lost his faith and didn't press EXECUTE.
This is very funny.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
There is no CERN only ZULE!
i finished discomboobalating the energymotron...whatever.
It's a statement written by Fermilab themselves, yet it's anti-US because it seems to be Fermilab's fault?
They must be Democrat lefties, the whole bunch of them.
Sounds like Black Mesa's experiment in Half-Life 1's introduction. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wow! CERN really DID invent a time machine as predicted, because this fake story from tomorrow got posted a day early.
Sig for hire.
Hey, didn't anyone ever tell you to keep your optics clean?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Oddone and Aymar will speak again at the end of the week."
CERN also had to take into consideration the tidal forces on lake Geneva. It was a big issue for them and shows the level of precision that went into designing and constructing the project. Quite remarkable.
happens when the unintended event horizon occurs.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Hrm, maybe that has something to do with that the Chunnel is 2 miles of interesting parts and 29 miles of a simple tunnel? Not to mention that the Big Dig was a complete renovation of an old infrastructure while keeping the city running at the same time.
And England was shut down whilst the Chunnel was being built.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
I thought I saw the sky turn purple yesterday...
is the "Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain
Period.
Those magnets are the best they could make them.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Not only that, the RFID chip of my passport was erased as well :-)
Anyone missing PST files from last tuesday can use this.
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