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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.
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/
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.
I would be surprised. Shit happens.
No, but I'd be a bit surprised if it was sabotage.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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
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.
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).
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.
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
I would have been amazed if a structure as complex as this worked the first time the switch was thrown. Think about how simply enormous the LHC is. It has miles of wire, gigantic magnets that have to be perfectly synced and placed with amazing accuracy. It's not like LHCs are turned out every week. Gigantic super colliders are HARD to build.
They'll eventually iron out all the problems and can proceed to cause the world to end.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
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.
> 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.
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.
For the slashdotters who haven't yet seen the CERN webcam images of the leak occuring:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
I'd be surprised too, but not as surprised as I would be if it were really time traveling sabotage agents from the future sent back to keep the experiment that while uncovering the physics that allowed time travel to ultimately be discovered unleashes the hordes of microscopic interdimensional atom-eaters that munch on matter and defecate thermal neutrons. Because these molecule sized creatures (some say they are intelligent) are alive they multiply exponentially but though the early stages of infestation they were hardly noticed. But after some years their presence was obvious and our doom was sealed unless time travel could somehow save the world... These creatures entered our plane of existance through a wormhole opened at the LHC. The LHC had to be destroyed, or if not destroyed, at least delayed. T-100, a robotic facsimilie of a particle physicist, looking remarkably like Arnold Schwartzenpecker was sent back to throw a wooden clog into the workings of the LHC.
...
Universe destroys Large Hadron Collider!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yeah, but from the perspective of the non-geeks, it was finished and "turned on" just a few days ago.
"It cost 70 bazillions of dollars to build, and now it's BROKE? What, they never actually DID anything with it yet either? What a joke" they'll say.
From the perspective of the non-geeks, this thing is a perpetual money sink, a haven for nerds to tinker and fiddle with things that require unending tinkering and fiddling by design, with only a carrot of some potentially really great stuff that just might some day dribble out of the thing.
Think about it, whoever wrote the grants or whatever that got them all that money is a genius - "Ummm yes, I need 70 bazillion dollars. What does it do? Ummmmm, yes, it will have the potential to reveal to us the HIGGS BOSON! Yes. HIGGS BOSON. What good is the HIGGS BOSON? Ummmm, yes, the HIGGS BOSON promises to reveal to us the very SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE!
Go LHC! As a geek myself, I say we need more of these things!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
LHC = Leaking Helium Coolant
Quite appropriately named uh?
>What does it do? Ummmmm, yes, it will have the potential to reveal to us the HIGGS BOSON! Yes. HIGGS BOSON.
Wot?
All this money just to peek at Miss Higgs Bosom?
No! Don't you see!? This is quantum immortality at work! The universe in which the LHC works is the one in which WE ALL DIE!
</paranoid>
When _I_ turn something on, I set it up completely first, leaving only one final connection incomplete. That connection is made by an enormous knife switch, which I throw to the dramatic dimming of lights (managed by my assistant; my invention is of course on another power source entirely), sparks, and the scent of ozone. THAT is how you turn something big on.
Absolutely. My wife is an astronomer. At the observatory she's at (Apache Point, as recently featured on Mythbusters) most of the instruments that they mount on the telescope require cooling either through liquid nitrogen being poured into reservoirs twice a day or through electronic CryoTigers. They just came out of shutdown (an extended maintenance period when they close for most of August to perform heavy maintenance) and a month after coming out of shutdown one of the CryoTigers developed a fault, causing an instrument to warm.
When this happens, the instrument has to warm to ambient temperature (a full day), the CryoTiger has to be repaired (at least a day), then the instrument cooled again (another day). Instrument is out of commission for a good three days. The sad thing was that it was scheduled for a time-critical block, fortunately the weather was poor and they couldn't have used it anyway.
Monumental PITB. I can only imagine how much nastier it is with the LHC.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Fuck, I can't even get Hello World to work on the first compile most of the time.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
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.
I looked at a number of the early posts and didn't see this joke - hope it's not a repeat ...
...
I just keep having this image in my head of two of the technicians for the LHC wandering through the innards of the thing, when one suddenly looks at the other and says, "Aw crap! A Helium leak!"
Sounding, of course, like a chipmunk.
I talk about stuff.
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?