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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/
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.
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).
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.
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
Not until they get it fixed anyway.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
There is not just one line. There are 6 lines as far as I know. They transport superfluid helium as well as warm helium. Here is a paper about the cryo system:
http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/AccelConf/e96/PAPERS/ORALS/THO04A.PDF
Anyways, they are now investigating with a remote inspection train that can travel in the LHC.
Paper accessible here:
http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/p07/PAPERS/MOPAN076.PDF
Sorry but I am going to an anonymous coward -- but clearly, this post comes from CERN...
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.
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