Slashdot Mirror
Second Snag This Week Could Delay LHC for Weeks
sciencehabit writes "After a transformer failure earlier this week, the Large Hadron Collider has hit another snag — and this one is much more serious. As Science reports, 'At least one of the LHC's more than 1700 superconducting magnets failed, springing a leak and spewing helium gas into the subterranean tunnel that houses the collider ... How long [repairs take] will depend in part on how much of the LHC must be warmed to room temperature for servicing. If it's only a short section, the repair could be relatively quick. But the machine is built in octants, and if workers have to heat and cool an entire octant, then the cooling alone would take several weeks."
Reader Simmeh contributes coverage from the BBC. We recently discussed the transformer malfunction at the LHC, which was a smaller problem and has already been fixed. Update - 9/20 at 12:52 by SS: CNN reports that the LHC will be out of commission for two months.
I wanna live in the dimension where the LHC works.
Seems like God is trying to send us a message...
Seriously would anyone be surprised if this wasn't well-meaning but ultimately misguided sabotage?
The Milky Way Darwin Award Committee has to wait a bit longer before awarding the little blue ex-planet.
Table-ized A.I.
Could it be that the to-be-discovered Higgs boson particulars are causing effecting the past and causing malfunctions with the LHC's components? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/08/11/will-the-lhc%E2%80%99s-future-cancel-out-its-past/
See! See! Those black holes got loose, its the end, THE END! /sarcasm
Dr.Kleiner got his high pitched voice.
Thar she blows, ye scalleywag... doewn beluw deck she's spewin colder then the centre o' hell.
Mark me wards... there's trouble brewing... somethin strange and black. Beware, I say... beware!!!
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
predict that the LHC will have undergone all its repairs and be ready to switch on again no sooner than December 21, 2012. Yarr*!
* Is 12:21am the next day too late? :'(
All I could envision was a bunch of physicists coming out of the tunnel squeaking like chipmunks.
I have nothing to contribute but a cheap laugh and for that I am sorry.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I'd like to know the diameter of the vacuum-insulated piping that is transporting the liquid helium for cooling. Piping large volumes of that stuff is not trivial.
Yes, because taking nearly 30 years to build this was rushing.
Calm down, one of the magnets quenched. When that happens, it gets REALLY hot and things break. They knew it could happen.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Some cosmological models posit that every possible quantum state simultaneously exists, but that we can only observe one particular collapsed wave function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(science)#Many_worlds_interpretation_of_quantum_physics). So, maybe the LHC *does* in fact destroy the world when it is turned on, and we always find ourselves in a world that has not been destroyed (ie, one where the LHC is not functioning properly).
A delay of a few weeks for a project that has been a decade in planning is no big deal. The universe isn't going anywhere.
I came here for a good argument
I shouldn't have left that weighted companion cube in there. I just couldn't bring myself to incinerate it like I was supposed to.
Yeah, relax. Any project of its scale is going to have issues. They'll sort it out with time.
Are you kidding me? It's an incredibly complicated machine on a scale that has never been done before in history. Things are supposed to be breaking now, that's how the scientists learn and it gets better over time. But of course people are always there in the wings ready to criticize that everything is not completely perfect.
more relevant wikipedia article about the implications for observers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation
Only minds that exist can observe; only minds that have not been destroyed by the LHC can exist. So, if the LHC really destroys the earth we'll keep observing it not functioning correctly.
Calling it the "Large Hole of Cash" seems a bit unjustified. Even in the unlikely event that it turns out to be completely useless for physics, the technologies developed for particle detectors in the LHC have direct applications in medical imaging, and the LHC's computing Grid is working on problems such as protein folding. It's certainly not a pointless cash sink. Especially considering the amount of cash that governments tend to sink into various other unproductive things.
I work on helium-cooled radio telescope receivers. They have trouble regularly - it sometimes takes five or six tries to get the thing cooling properly. These poor folks have over a thousand giant Dewars to keep cold! Give them a break.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
And one great way (mentioned in the links) is to kill yourself, and see if that merely excludes from your observation any world in which you'd be dead.
Hey, just puttin' it out there.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
oh i know this level
just beyond the dead space marine after you open the first door (watch out for the imp sniping at you from above) there's a false panel marked "UHC" (not "LHC") on your left. shoot that with your pistol and it opens. but shooting your pistol will wake a cacodemon further down the hall
easy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Having worked on one of these, two failures this early on is par for the course. There's a lot of work to be done even after the thing is build and initial testing is done before it's stable and working (and even then, most particular accelerators are only somewhat "stable" with very heavy maintainance).
I meant it more as a joke than anything--next time, I've got to keep my mouth shut. :-)
Do they still get paid?
If there is no work is there any pay?
Keep Nuking 'Em Forever!
or does anyone else sigh/cringe/exhale violently when they hear about how this thing was constructed?
You can look at much LHC status online, including detailed cyro status. (I'm not giving the URL, so as not to Slashdot that server. You can find it if you really care.) Sector 34 of the LHC is at sector 34 at 4.5K-20K, instead of down below 4.5K where it should be. One of the magnets quenched and went normal, and much of the energy in the magnet is dumped as heat. Then the liquid helium boils to a gas and blows out through relief valves. But the sector hasn't been brought up to room temperature, so they apparently think they can fix the problem without major work on the magnet.
Some of the cyrogenic magnets gave serious trouble last year, but apparently it's not as bad this time.
is PIPINGGUY
STOP!!!!!
Is anyone listening?
Well I have to admit that the LHC has been built a lot better than I had even hoped. Working at CERN I can access the LHC status pages and the internal reports on how far they have gotten and to be honest before the breakdown they had gotten things done that everyone assumed would take 3-4 weeks.
And the big startup of LHC on 10th of September which went with only a few minor glitches was an extremely gutsy thing to do. I mean you have hundreds of reporters there when you attempt to power the thing on and do a full scale test of almost all components LIVE. That's gutsy. What's even more amazing is that it actually worked! They got the beam around both ways and by the evening (when the press had left already) they already had stable beams which did hundreds of orbits around the accelerator. Also being at CERN I can tell that the pre-testing they did before the big event was really marginal. The beam was only tested a few km along the tunnel in both directions, never too far so they were really treading on unknown territory.
I'd love to see some other huge experiment/production like that to show their results live in front of the world when they first start it :P
LHC salesdroid: "See, I TOLD you that you were gonna want that extended warranty. But NOOOOO!"
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
And even if it does turn out to be completely useless for physics, I would have much rather have seen my US tax dollars be wasted on something like a particle collider than how they've been wasted in Iraq. Money spent on science is almost never truly wasted.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Guess I better make that credit card payment I was going to blow off.
Somebody else please post a possibly related observation about the you-know-what administration's close calls with doomsday. I'm too chicken to risk mod points ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
Let me guess; you work for Fanny Mae. Splains alot.
Table-ized A.I.
> So, if the LHC really destroys the earth we'll keep observing it not functioning correctly.
Until it does, in fact, start working and destroy the earth. After all, while all the many-things ideas are fun to discuss, they only say that if the LHC necessarily destroys earth when it works, there will be branches that will have observed the LHC never working and that these will be the only ones with humanity intact.
We could very well observe the destruction of the world, but we can rest assured that some other versions of us will continue on, wondering how the LHC turned out to be a total piece of crap.
End of the earth put off for another few months? but hey, the mayan calender of whatnot said 2012, right?
That sure is a great theory about how the LHC cannot work. Wonderful, actually.
And completely ridiculous.
When the LHC does start the kooks are going to come out and say that it just simply doesn't have the power to create these particles -- yea, that's why it's working now.
And then we'll get our first pictures of the boson. And yet, for some strange reason, hardly anyone will remember that a bunch of people were behaving like total fools, and the world will go on. And the kooks will claim we're not looking at what we think we're looking at.
And the world will go on.
Call me when the LHC actually accomplishes something.
No, wait, scratch that. I'll be happy enough just waiting until whatever it might accomplish actually reaches my doorstep in one manner or another.
I'm all for it, don't get me wrong. But I'm pragmatic -- there's nothing about it that I can change one way or another. So, I say bring it on, and let the amazing world-changing events happen. I'm just not holding my breath nor am I doubting it in the meantime.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This is one of the largest, most complex projects ever conceived. By its very nature, it tests the limits of our understanding of the universe, and our ability to engineer within it. There WILL be bugs, there WILL be glitches, and progress will be slow while we work out the mechanics of operating at this level.
That LHC is down isn't surprising, it's expected. Wait 2-5 years, at which point the majority of kinks will be worked out and the LHC will be enjoying its "second wind".
Have you ever built something big, powerful, and complex? If you have, you'd know that "turning it on" is not a sudden point, it's a gradual process of implementation until it's fully operational, with hundreds or thousands of small, minor issues found and addressed as implementation approaches 100% complete.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The US is not involved in the LHC, at least not directly.
The alternative is that we will all die next time they turn it on. On the other hand, I suspect the LHC will turn us into radio-active, flying sheep (optionally with fins & lasers) before it destroys the world. :)
That being said, I enjoy the actual discussion about this topic, I just think it does not have any factual value whatsoever. But as a philosophical question, it's great
This is a hige project. More than two decades were spent on it. A myriad of components has been used, many of which were designed for the LHC. Some stuff just simply _has_ to break.
That being said, I think those people will be able to fix the issues that come up from time to time and then have a smooth-running experimental setup.
I would expect at least a douzend of failures and faults of that magnitude until full power is reached.
Its just too complex.
And about the "expensive!!!1" aspect: A few months delay are so much cheaper than spending twice as much before so try to get everything 200% perfect. And even then things might go wrong.
Even in a tiny normal synchrotron, shit happens. At the ALS in Berkelely they managed to detonante a main PSU because they only tested them one at a piece, and when build in they had bad crosstalk. Beam was down for several weeks.
At the SLS in Villigen, even months after the full ramp-up beam instabilities or drops happened on rather regular basis.
Such things happen.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Shit, you had better tell the US that. Fermilab seems to be rather under the impression that they a) built the quadrapole magnets for the LHC (which failed rather spectacularly a year or so ago and see the project back but thats another story) and b) that they are actively contributing to CMS commissioning, data taking and physics including setting up and maintaining useful systems like cmsmon (although that sadly is off due to greek hackers).
The US has a huge role in the LHC and its experiments and contribute both man power, money and equipement. They are the biggest national group on CMS (although Europe as a whole is of course bigger) and have been involved in the construction of many subsystems.
...messing with god knows what!
Gordon, what the hell were you thinking, pushing that crate in front of the descending laser shield!?
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Observation in the physics sense does not require a mind.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
The US is not involved in the LHC, at least not directly.
You might want to read a bit on this page:
http://www.uslhc.us/
The US is involved with more than half a Billion US Dollars and more than a thousand (thousands?) of scientists and engineers. I think more than a quarter of the 2200 members of the ATLAS collaboration (one of the larger experiments at LHC) are from US universities and institutions.
Ten hadrons rushing around that, that LHC, and what happens to your own personal experiment? I just the other day got, an experiment was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the moring on Tuesday and I just didn't get it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these cooling problems and helium leaks going on the LHC auxiliarily.
[...]
They want to deliver vast amounts of hadrons and experiments over the LHC. And again, the LHC is not something you just dump something in. It's not an internet.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled with helium and if they are filled, when you put your experiment in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of helium, enormous amounts of helium.
DiDnt think it was powerful enough to play Crysis, now its proving it.
If you are not familiar with superconducting magnets, then some of these terms may seem a bit mysterious. So, here goes...
A superconducting magnet is essentially a big coil of superconductor. Initially, you put current into the superconductor to build up the magnetic field. You then 'join the ends' of the superconducting loop, so the current circulates endlessly, and the middle has a constant magnetic field.
There is a lot of energy in the magnetic field. An 11-tesla magnetic field has about the same energy per unit volume as TNT. Worse than TNT, there is no rest mass to the 'explosive' so all the magnetic field energy would be dumped straight to the surround. The surround is already under a lot of tension due to the magnetic field, so the magnet would blow apart spectacularly, if it wasn't properly designed.
The magnet has a link in the superconductor which is heated to drive it 'normal': this is used when the magnetic field is being built up. This link usually has a great big conventional shunt resistor in parallel with it with great big heat sinks, and this arrangement is usually on the top of the magnet. If the helium level gets low or something else funny happens, the hope is that the coil superconductivity will go at this point rather than anywhere else. The magnetic energy, instead of getting dumped into the magnet's structure, gets dumped into this shunt resistor. It may glow yellow, and boil off lots of helium, but the magnetic field can collapse over a few seconds rather than instantly, and won't release an electromegnetic pulsed that might set off a chain reaction with the magnets next door.
What has happened here is that the safety system has gone off in one of the magnets just as it ought to. I expect they will inspect the shunt assembly to check nothing has scorched when all the energy got dumped, and also to try and find out why it did. However, with luck they can get it all going again without interrupting the vacuum.
Large Hadron Collider to be shut down for two months to undergo repairs for damage caused by an electrial fault, AP reports.
"Talk Like a Pirate" day was yesterday. Does this mean we can continue with our pirate ways? Shiver me timbers! Ye'll meet the rope's end for that, me bucko!
Hawking vs Einstein (higgs mentioned)
According to a press release from CERN, they plan at least two months of downtime, since sector 34 needs to be warmed in order for the repair to take place:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR09.08E.html
On my Google page just now:
Universe destroys Large Hadron Collider!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
that the bad magnet took out the first transformer?
Then the magnet died when it was restarted on the new transformer?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
If the universe had something to say about the LHC, it should have done it way before; plans were available at our local office on alpha centauri...
LHC = Leaking Helium Coolant
Quite appropriately named uh?
After the failure last year of a magnet assembly provided by Fermilab the powers that be at CERN decided to forgoe a lot of the very low power testing that should have been done, instead chosing to meet an artificial schedule. Bad move and if they have any brains they would now revert back to the original plans once they restart.
The odds were that if Fermilab had in fact produced the Higgs the data analysis would show this before CERN could file their own discovery so there really is nothing to race against- either Fermi has the data or they dont.
But it could be functional if there were outside observers who wouldn't be immediately destroyed by the event. And since the total mass of the earth wouldn't change, anybody in orbit would be perfectly safe from the effect of a possible event - the ISS would keep orbiting like nothing happened (and, actually, it would be a more stable orbit, since all the atmosphere would be sucked into the black hole as well.)
Of course, it's all a moot point anyway, if Hawking is right - any black hole created by two protons would evaporate in less time than they would take to absorb any more matter.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
What failed, apparently, was a non-cryogenic high-current electrical connection in one of the magnets. They didn't have a magnet winding failure, which is much worse; the whole magnet would probably have to be removed from the tunnel for repairs if that happened. To fix the current problem, they're going to have to bring some magnets up to room temperature, lose vacuum, fix the thing, and chill everything down again. It's a slow process, but not too bad.
Even though the statements from CERN are relatively terse, you can watch the LHC cyro status on line, which gives a good idea of what's being worked on.
to all things that matter is the Higgs Boson.
Clearly the LHC will constantly have problems not allowing it to function, at least not for the next four years. When it finally debuts on December 21, 2012, well.....
This makes me think of the great SF story "Doomsday Device", by John Gribbin (Analog, Feb. 1985 -- unfortunately not available online, AFAIK). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In fact, the accelerator *has* worked; the only realities the characters experience involve highly unlikely equipment failures. (Thus, a many-worlds physics is shown to be correct.) It's further revealed that the world has been "anthropically steered" in the past by arranging for it to be destroyed when things are not going well.
These poor folks have over a thousand giant Dewars to keep cold! Give them a break.
Why should we give them a break when they have that much cold scotch?
I felt really stupid when I read that and didn't understand it but then I realized that somewhere out there I am understanding it.
Grid computing is an enormous cash sink itself.
Clearly we should test your theory. Maybe by driving the earth into the sun? If you're right, something will fail catastrophically and we won't be able to do it.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Nope, go away christfag.
Goodbye World is much quicker.
It kind of reminds me how you can beat a video game even if you die hundreds of times: through the save game feature. Apparently, the God autosaves the Earth each time the LHC is about to become operational.
So they can find 1 trillion to save banks, but can they find 1 trillion to give usa 1st class free education and fix infrastructure?
Let the banks fail, and use 1 trillion to fix usa, and not banks.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Just once, I'd like to see a report on the LHC that didn't call the Higgs Boson the "God Particle", and didn't talk about crackpot fears of mini black holes. I mean, we don't follow every report from the Mars polar lander or rovers about the "Canals of Mars were once thought to carry water", do we?
springing a leak and spewing helium gas into the subterranean tunnel
the biggest delay is apparently due to the difficulty of maintaining a serious attitude while in the tunnel...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Well, we won't be the ones who get destroyed. And neither will we. Nor, indeed, us. Because for every instant that passes, there is a new choicepoint and a new us. So don't fret it -- you personally will never experience oblivion.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato