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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!
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/
"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
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!
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.
It's on a news site in the science section !
WTF ?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
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.
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