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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.
But all credit cards within a 10-mile radius were erased.
...and make sure there aren't any redshirts around the next time you install 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.
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.
...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!
...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.
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. "
Is destroying the fabric of space and time actually a legitimate fear? I mean Jesus, there are forces thousands of orders of magnitude greater than what our measly Particle Accelerators can produce. Shouldn't we be worrying about stuff that's in the center of our galaxy more than what a few sentient beings on a little blue marble can do with their sciency toys?
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
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
That is why there is no "ha ha" tag and I hope there won't be one.
Another fried troll on this very serious post. I hope somebody follows up with more detail right here on the front page. I hope this does not jeopardize the LHC project in the medium or long term.
Rachel.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
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.
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.
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*
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.
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 ?Actually, I live in Batavia Illinois the town that Fermilab is located in. Its a neat place to go to but if you don't have the time or live to far just play Half-Life its like the same place.
that this thing can be refurbished and used as a chick magnet?
Not many chicks will be interested in sex if they are accelerated to close to the speed of light. At least in your frame of reference.
Of course we might be able to use it as a very very large MRI machine... perhaps seaworld can use it for its whales...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
so why wasn't this tagged "ha ha" ?
We're saving the ha-ha for when Switzerland disappears and the remaining crater is filled with a large strawberry shortcake with extra anchovies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The researcher tasked with inputting The Numbers lost his faith and didn't press EXECUTE.
Its ironic how you gave that example of a man trying to fix the brakes on his own, if it was not for people like him we would still be swinging from tree to tree. Not a bad life except that you wouldn't have the option of complaining about it on some internet forum.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
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!
There are cosmic particles hitting the atmosphere with more energy than the LHC will produce. If the LHC were going to cause a rift in the space time continuum, these particles would have done the same in the last 6 billion years that they've been hitting the atmosphere.
"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 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.
Particle events far more energetic than anything our best accelerators can even approach occur daily in our upper atmosphere, and have for the entire 4.5 billion years of the Earth's existence. Earth is still here.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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.
yawn... call it hunch, but based on your post, I'd wager that you don't have any background whatsoever in a real scientific discipline.
Slashdot is funny that way... There are people here that could melt you with their brain just by thinking about it, and then there are the people that read an article in a tabloid at the supermarket checkout and believe that this experience qualifies them to have an informed opinion on matters of nuclear physics. Which are you?
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."
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"
Nature has been performing experiments in our atmosphere for 4.55 billion years at energies much higher than we could hope to attain in a collider. If it was possible for a black hole spawned in one of these event to swallow the Earth (or whatever other nightmare scenario you've envisioned), it would have already happened and you wouldn't be around to discuss it.
Reference 1
Reference 2
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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...
Do you have any idea how much a chick would weigh if she was travelling close to the speed of light? Not even a /.er would want some of that mass.
I admit I'm just a particle physics noob, so if you know why I'm wrong please (try to) enlighten me.
On a sidenote, even if this were to happen, i think it would take a veeeeery long time for this to turn into a real problem. Just imagine how small the event horizon of a black hole with the mass of a few protons would be. I wouldn't be surprised if it could pass right through the nucleus of an atom without even hitting any matter.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You could take some solice in the fact that the sun (and other stars) apparently don't have problems with these particles passing through them. While the interaction cross section would likely be far smaller at relativistic velocities, I don't think they would be zero (this is the critical assumption). if you think about the number of these events that happen on a regular basis to stars, including neutron stars, which have an escape velocity of half the speed of light meaning that whats left after a collisions is more likely to stick around. Now, neutrons starts have density similar to nuclei, so it's reasonable to expect that traveling through a few miles of nuclei several times would be similar to spending quite a while vibrating around in Earth.
Period.
Those magnets are the best they could make them.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Thanks, I make a serious a serious, on-topic post about something, and I get modded down for it "by mistake". Just goes to show, it's not my driving I should worry about but other peoples!
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Anyone missing PST files from last tuesday can use this.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
first post ever!..yeah shameless but mod it up anyways!
Aaron Miller
Aaron Miller Computers
I was referring to the kinetic energy (Earth frame of reference) of the cosmic ray just before it enters the top of the atmosphere, therefore I was not only referring to the energy of the most energetic particle, I was referring to the energy of the only particle. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make. Perhaps you got confused and thought I was referring to after the cosmic ray hits something and generates an enormous shower of particles. If we were going to count those there would be a lot more but of lower energy.
Typical anonymous coward, going off half-cocked.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show