Slashdot Mirror
Large Hadron Collider Struggling
Writing in the NY Times, Dennis Overbye covers the birthing pangs and the prospects for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which we have discussed numerous times). "The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. [And] many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine [Fermilab's Tevatron] across the ocean. ... Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone... Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy [of 7 TeV]. Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 [TeV]. 'We could be doing physics at the end of November,' he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks. 'It's not the design energy of the machine, but it's 4 times higher than the Tevatron,' he said."
Agreed. There's a reason the term "cutting edge" is used to describe cutting edge science, and in cutting edge science, well, if it worked perfectly the first time it probably wasn't very ambitious.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
For now, it will only be able to collide small and medium Hadrons...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
FTFA:
"scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength"
Looking more and more likely that a Dec 2012 full-power test could be on the cards.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
After I invested my entire 401(k) in crowbars???
Just how they managed to suck billions of dollars from governments is beyond me
Well, you could say the LHC working better than intended. Instead of making a black hole, it became one.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
But the peak current is tens-of-thousands of amps, and the connections are between superconducting cables made of exotic materials, and once the connection is made at room temperature it has to be cooled down by almost 300 degrees (150 times colder than where it started) with all the flexing and stressing that causes, and still can't have more than one or two nano-ohms resistance or the whole experiment blows up. Yes, the electrical connections in the LHC are the equivalent of rocket science.
SMQ 90AE4B2BC4F6BEAF7340F0B40BA2DEF7340F6BC2D0392
The aim is still to go to 7TeV/beam this is only a temporary reduction in energy. In addition all the evidence so far points to a low mass higgs, not up at the hard ~1TeV/c2 limit where the energy is actually important. This is not unprecedented - the Tevatron which was supposed to be 1TeV/beam ran at 0.8 TeV for the first run and increased it to 0.96 TeV for the second run.
However, That being said it was never really the case that would would turn the machine on and the Higgs would magically pop out of the ether for all to see. The most likely scenario is a low mass Higgs which decays to b-quarks. Unfortunately the LHC will be EXTREMELY good at producing b quarks from known physic processes (there is even a entire experiment devoted to studying them - LHCb). The result is that a lot of hard, painstaking work will be needed before we can spot the b quarks from a Higgs from background "ordinary" b quarks. Of course there is still a chance that the Higgs might have enough mass to decay to two Z bosons which would be very easy to see early on but, if the Standard Model Higgs exists, the chance looks slim.
Just because it's "cutting edge" doesn't mean it must fail the first time they try to run it for real.... having so many bad joints as part of the reason for failure is a sign of poor workmanship and quality control given the multi-billion dollar budget. It's not a bunch of mad scientists working in their garage on their own dime, it's a bunch of *highly paid* mad scientists using scads of public funds.
;-)
I'd give them the "cutting edge" argument if the physics didn't turn out as expected, but bad joints... give me a break.
So much for swiss workmanship.
Given the reduced energy: Re, the Higgs Boson (that's the one that everybody talks about): Is that still the one sure thing that this machine will sort out? If the Higgs exists, will they still see it right away, and if it doesn't, will the scientists still finally say, "There is no Higgs, we need new physics to account for why; things have mass, something in our standard model went awry"?
No, it won't. Actually God keeps breaking the LHC. You didn't think (s)he'd let a bunch of monkeys have h(er/is) particle do you?
CERN does not have a majority of these under their belt. It might be a difference in how they are managed. Perhaps Fermilab has a better hierarchy, better safety rules and prioritizes work more efficiently. Maybe they actually triple check each wire before they press the On button and CERN cuts corners. This is all supposition, but reality is a harsh mistress and it is obvious they're doing something wrong.
Clearly you must me be a theoretical physicist, as opposed to a experimentalist, because that explanation was really complicated and stuff, although it did lack the required theoretical physicist collection of complicated equations.
The experimentalist physicist explanation is, as usual, much simpler, the LHC has more recent news reports about failures than the Tevatron, because the LHC was first run in late 2008, and the tevatron was completed in 1983, somewhat before the birth of a typical grad student, so all the news reports about tevatron teething problems were more than a quarter century ago, and long forgotten.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
... best of what's still around. I've noticed a distinct decline in the quality of professional services in the last decade.
Unrelated. The LHC failures have all been caused by unforeseen consequences of standard techniques applied in completely unique situations or new techniques developed to suit the situation. When you are doing something that has literally never, ever been done before things like this are common. Prior experience can only take you so far after that you are learning how to do the thing because you are the first person to ever do it. This is a far cry from installing a sink or rewiring a house which has been done thousands of times before and for which the ways in which it can fail are well known and can be avoided.
The people involved in the work are not just a few plumbers and electricians that were called up from the local yellow pages (or Pages Jaunes at CERN) but are either CERN employees or employers of contractors. My experience has been that while they are extremely "union" orientated (they are very particular about their breaks, starting/stopping work etc) they are also extremely professional to the point where they have come and shown be the right way to do something so it did not make their work look unprofessional!
You're right. I do hate scientists.
In recent upgrades to the LHC, the collider has been equipped to smash large amounts of money together and observe its annihilation:
"We start with a 50 Euro note and a 50 USD note," Dr. Grotzy explained. "We accelerate them to near the speed of light- interesting things can happen when the velocity of money gets this high. When the beams of Euros and USDs collide - thousands of notes per minute- we get some interesting reactions.
"This is a photograph of one such collision- an annihilation as you can see," Grotzy said, pointing at the annotated diagram. "The buck stops here."
"Out of it you can see these spiraling particles. Given the $50 is one of the ingredient particles, we call this 'Grant money going down the drain'.
"The experiment is actually quite easy to run. If the beams start to wane you just go up to the generator and throw more money at it.
"To keep busy we'll be adding more projects. With with a little more funding from the Brits, we can test out a heating system powered by burning cash. Convert a pound's mass into energy.
"Some people are concerned this collider will produce economic black holes that will destroy the worldwide economy. I can assure you this is nothing but uninformed rumor.
My webcomic
Here's what's going on: in every universe that the LHC works, the earth immediately disappears in a giant black hole, so, by the entropic principle, we must always be in one of the failures. The project will be plagued with failure until they give up! It's proof positive that we live in a multiverse!