Additional warning systems and safeguards delay the restart of LHC

By Calvin Palmer

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  has been delayed by two months by officials at CERN to allow engineers to install and test early warning and protection systems designed to avoid the catastrophic faults that occurred days after it was switched on last September.

This further delay will mean that the machine, which aims to prove the existence of the Higgs boson or “God particle” and answer other questions about the nature of the universe, will not have been in operation for a full year.

The first particle collisions are now scheduled for late October. CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research, will also take the unusual step of running the particle accelerator through most of next winter, to make up for lost time in collecting physics data.

Atom-smashers are generally shut down over the winter months, to allow for maintenance and to avoid incurring peak charges for their very high electricity needs.

The decision to run the $5.8 billion (£4 billion) accelerator over the winter, with only a short break for Christmas, will cost CERN an extra $10.1 million (£7 million), a 40 per cent increase on its usual operating costs. However, it means physicists will be able to start working on real data from all four of the LHC experiments next year. This could prove crucial in competing with the US Tevatron, a less powerful accelerator that is already running.

A faulty splice in the wiring shut down the LHC on September 19, nine days after the machine started up with a wave of publicity and fears, by some, that it would cause the destruction of the planet.

The resulting electrical arc damaged a section of the equipment and punctured an enclosure holding the liquid helium used to keep the collider at a temperature colder than outer space for maximum efficiency.

It has taken months to determine the full extent of the damage, which was limited to one of the eight sectors in the collider housed in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border on Geneva’s outskirts.

After the shutdown, 53 of the massive magnets designed to guide and focus the beams of protons that whiz at the speed of light through the tunnel had to be brought to the surface to be cleaned or repaired.

To prevent a recurrence of the problem, CERN is installing a new, highly sensitive protection system to detect any unwanted increases in resistance on the electrical connections so that it can shut down the current before anything is damaged, CERN said.

Scientists also are installing new pressure relief valves for the liquid helium in two phases. The first set of valves will ensure that any damage would be minor should there be a repeat of the September failure.

The second set, to be installed this year and next year, “would guarantee” only minor damage “in all worst cases over the life of” the collider, according to a CERN.

The aim, said spokeswoman Christine Sutton, is to “ensure that this machine is going to work beautifully for the coming decade or more”.

“With these additional valves we should really be safe against this kind of incident. Any damage that will occur will only be minor and not anywhere near as disruptive,” she said.

The massive machine was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms into each other at high energy and record what particles are produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the universe and everything in it.

They hope the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing quickly.

[Based on reports by The Times and Associated Press.]

LHC out of action until spring 2009

By Calvin Palmer

The car goes into the shop for supposedly some minor repair and the mechanic tells you it will be ready in three hours.  They always say they will give you a call when it is ready but never do and you end up ringing them.
 
Then comes the awful news.  “We’ve hit a snag,” says the voice at the other end of the line.  A complicated explanation involving valve seats, piston rings, timing chains or some such mechanical component ensues.  It is then followed by, “It’s going to take a couple of days” and the caveat, “if we can get the parts straight away.”
 
A similar kind of scenario has emerged from CERN concerning the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland.

Earlier last week, the $9 billion atom smasher suffered a problem with a power transformer that controlled the refrigeration.

The collider ring has to be cooled to a temperature of minus 271.3 Celsius so the protons can travel round the accelerator at more than 99.99 per cent of the speed of light.

That was fixed.  On Friday, as the machine was started up again, one of the magnets overheated sending out a cloud of helium and the project was once again delayed.

The CERN spokesman, James Gillies, the equivalent of the mechanic in the repair shop, initially said that the repair would take two weeks.  The following day, when the full extent of the damage had been assessed, Gillies stated that the LHC was going to be out of action for two months.

According to CERN, the initial investigations suggest a faulty electrical connection, isn’t it always the electrics, between two of the accelerator’s magnets.  But, and here we go, the engineers need time to diagnose the problem fully and they say it cannot be done before their laboratory is closed down for winter maintenance.  It is expected that the collider will now be reactivated again in the spring.

That’s all very well for the engineers to say but where does that leave all the particle physics guys.  It’s not like you can rent another LHC from Hertz or Enterprise to keep the project on the road, so to speak.

Robert Aymar, the director general of CERN, described the news as a “psychological blow” to the project.

He said, “Nevertheless, the success of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex.

“I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application.”

With a quote like, you can tell instantly he is the director general.  It’s the kind of well done chaps if we all pull together we can soon be back up and running pep-talk they come out with.  The only problem is, like any good director general, his contribution to the “pulling” will be proton size.

So the world must wait for the LHC to recreate the conditions just seconds after the Big Bang and answer some of the imponderables of particle physics.

At least the theoretical Higgs boson, commonly referred to as the “God particle” can enjoy a few more months of remaining theoretical, maybe even longer.

Worse than that the inauguration ceremony scheduled for October 21, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to attend, will now be postponed.  It gives him a little longer to read up on the subject so that he can ask a meaningful question or two, as if.

[Based on reports in The Daily Telegraph and AFP news agency.]

LHC put out of action for two months

By Calvin Palmer

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, has suffered another setback, which will postpone the smashing of atoms for two months, according to CERN spokesman James Gillies.
 
After successfully resolving an issue with a 30-tonne refrigeration unit, which put the project on ice, so to speak, a further problem arose when up to a tonne of liquid helium was lost after some of the superconducting magnets inadvertently heated up this morning.
 
Fire crews were sent to that part of the tunnel and engineers were still investigating the extent of the malfunction this afternoon.  Officials were not in a position to way how long it would take to fix the problem or how it would affect the schedule of the $9 billion LHC.
 
Gillies said: “The incident occurred while we were commissioning the final sector and a lot of helium has leaked into the tunnel.  We are investigating now and we should have a clearer picture over the weekend.”
 
On Saturday, a clearer picture did emerge. “The failure will delay the process of commissioning by at least two months,” he said.

“It seems to be the faulty connection that quenched. It stopped superconducting, which led it to heat up and melt, which in turn seems to have caused the mechanical failure that released helium,” said Gillies. 

As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine’s final sector rose by around 100C.

One of the eight sectors of the LHC will have to return to room temperature and pressure for the magnet to be repaired, or possbily replaced.

While a repair of the magnet itself would take no more than two days, it will take “several weeks” to warm up the sector and then another “several weeks” to cool it down again, explained Gillies.

Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University said: “It’s disappointing of course to have to wait another couple of months for the physics to begin, but with a machine as complex as the LHC these things will happen in the commissioning stage.

“When we do wonderful and difficult things at the very edge of our capability we can’t expect everything to go smoothly, but this is the price we must pay to make the most profound discoveries about our Universe.”

Earlier this week, a failure in the power transformer affected the refrigeration unit.  The collider ring has to be cooled to a temperature of minus 271.3 Celsius so the protons can travel round the 17-mile long accelerator at more than 99.99 percent the speed of light.
 
The LHC experiment hopes to answer questions regarding the origins of the universe by creating the conditions that occurred just seconds after the Big Bang.
 
It is hoped that the existence of the theoretical particle, the Higgs boson, will be confirmed.  The discovery of this particle, also known as the “God particle,” will complete the Standard Model of particle physics by explaining how particles derive their mass.

[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph and Swissinfo.]

Hawking views LHC vital to humanity

By Calvin Palmer

Within a few hours, scientists will know if they have found the so-called “God’s particle” or sent the world and the entire cosmos into oblivion, as the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is fired up for the first time in Switzerland.
 
Professor Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, England, believes neither scenario will occur. 
 
He has gone as far as to place a $100 bet with a colleague that the elusive particle, also known as Higgs boson, will not be found and is also convinced that the LHC is perfectly safe and poses no threat to the planet or the universe.
 
Speaking on BBC Radio, Prof. Hawking said that he doubts the machine will have the power to unravel some of the universe’s secrets such as the Higgs boson particle, which is thought to give mass to all other particles.  Hence, his wager with colleagues.
 
“Whatever the LHC finds or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe,” he added.
 
Prof. Hawking was dismissive of speculation that the world could be put in grave danger by the force of the experiment.
 
“The LHC is absolutely safe.  If the collisions in the LHC produced a micro black hole – and it is unlikely – it would just evaporate away again, producing a correctoristic pattern of particles,” he said.
 
“Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth’s atmosphere and nothing terrible happens.  The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on.”
 
He urged patience with regard to any benefits to day-to-day living emerging from this experiment.
 
Prof. Hawking said: “Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe, rather than practical applications for commercial gain.  But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.  It is difficult to see an economic return from research at the LHC but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any.”
 
He views the LHC project as one of the most important in the history of scientific endeavor.  To choose between it and the space program would be like “asking him which one of his children he would choose to sacrifice.”
 
“Both the LHC and the space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out,” he said.  “Together they cost less than one tenth of a percent of the world’s GDP.  If the human race cannot afford this then it doesn’t deserve the epithet ‘human.'”
 
When the LHC is running at full power, trillions of protons will race around the 27-km LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, traveling at 99.99 percent the speed of light.  And when the two beams of protons collide, as a result of the huge electromagnets, the temperature generated will be more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun and concentrated within a space a billion times smaller than a speck of dust.
 
But there are also fears that the LHC will create a black hole that will not only destroy planet Earth but also the entire cosmos.
 
A German chemist, Professor Otto Rossler, believes there is a small chance that when the LHC is switched on it will create a mini black hole that will swallow the Earth from within and possibly trigger a chain reaction that could rip apart the universe.
 
Rossler has filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project.  His appeal for an injunction to stop the LHC from being switched on failed. 
 
In Hawaii, environmentalists have also filed a lawsuit calling for a halt to the project.  The case is pending with the Honolulu District Court.
 
The wheels of justice do not move at a speed anywhere approaching the speed of light, unlike protons in the LHC, so it is doubtful these legal moves will have any effect on halting the project.

CERN scientists receive death threats

By Calvin Palmer

In the old Frankenstein movies, the villagers took up cudgels, pitchforks and fiery torches, and marched on the castle to put an end to the mad scientist’s experiments.  These days, opponents of experiments resort to the legal system to call a halt, a far more civilized approach.  Well almost.
 
Scientists engaged on the CERN project in Switzerland have received death threats by e-mail and telephone calls, according to The Daily Telegraph.
 
The project, using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $9 billion atom smasher, aims to recreate the conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang in order to answer questions concerning the origins of the universe.
 
The building of the huge ATLAS detector, a 7,000-tonne component of the world’s biggest experiment, has been captured on a time-lapse film, thanks to Tim Heald, a particle physics Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester.

 
It is hoped the ATLAS detector will confirm the Higgs boson, a theoretical new particle proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s.  This hypothetical entity gives mass to every other particle in the universe and has been dubbed the “God Particle.”
 
When the LHC is running at full power, trillions of protons will race around the 27-km LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, traveling at 99.99 percent the speed of light.  And when the two beams of protons collide, as a result of the huge electromagnets, the temperature generated will be more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun and concentrated within a space a billion times smaller than a speck of dust.
 
But there are also fears that the LHC will create a black hole that will not only destroy planet Earth but also the entire cosmos.
 
A German chemist, Professor Otto Rossler, leads scientists who believe there is a small chance that when the LHC is switched on it will create a mini black hole that will swallow the Earth from within and possibly trigger a chain reaction that could rip apart the universe.
 
Rossler has filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project.  His appeal for an injunction to stop the LHC from being switched on failed.  The gargantuan machine will fire up on Wednesday.
 
In Hawaii, environmentalists have also filed a lawsuit calling for a halt to the project.  The case is pending with the Honolulu District Court.
 
One of the leading scientists in the project is Professor Brian Cox of the University of Manchester.  Prof. Cox was a keyboard player with the band D:Ream during his undergraduate days at Manchester University in the 1990s.  D:Ream had three Top Ten hits in the UK, including Things Can Only Get Better, which was adopted by the Labour Party as its election anthem.
 
He hails from Oldham, Lancashire, where people speak plainly and sometimes bluntly.  Prof. Cox told the Daily Telegraph that members of the CERN team had received death threats.  “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t**t,” he added.
 
And t**t is not a technical term from the field of particle physics.  For the benefit of American readers, it is derogatory and refers to the female pudenda.  I told you Oldham folk could be blunt.
 
Prof. Cox said: “There’s a kind of magic energy we’ve not been able to get to, and we know from previous experiments that’s where things happen.  Now for the first time, we’ll be crossing that barrier.”
 
Since the dawn of time, I expect there have always been detractors opposed to any form of experimentation.  I imagine those involved with trying to make fire were met with cries of, “Somebody is likely to get burned” or “The whole forest could go up in smoke.”
 
The day the human race stops experimenting and attempting to push forward the frontiers of scientific knowledge is the day that Mankind is doomed to stagnation and eventual decline.
 
If the LHC does prove its critics right and the Earth is swallowed up in a black hole, they certainly aren’t going to be around to say, “I told you so.”  But I will put my faith in Prof. Cox.  After all, he and I do share the same alma mater.

Apocalypse just a few days away?

By Calvin Palmer

There is no need to bother about who is going to be the next President of the United States.  Which two teams are going to get to Super Bowl XLIII no longer matters.  In fact, nothing is of any consequence.

Why?  Next Wednesday, a $9 billion atom smasher called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on in Geneva by scientists belonging to CERN, the European nuclear research organization, in an attempt to discover the origins of the universe. 
 
Critics argue that switching on the machine, the largest ever constructed by Mankind, will not only destroy planet Earth but also the entire cosmos.  Their fears have resulted in a lawsuit, lodged with the European Court of Human Rights, in an attempt to stop the machine from being turned on.
 
Led by German chemist Otto Rossler, this group of scientists believes there is a small chance that when the LHC is switched on, it will create a mini black hole that will swallow the Earth from within and possibly trigger a chain reaction that could rip apart the universe.
 
Professor Rossler, of Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen, said: “CERN itself had admitted that mini black holes could be created when the particles collide, but they don’t consider this a risk.
 
“My won calculations have shown that it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside.  I have been calling CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.
 
“We have submitted this application to the European Court of Human Rights as we do not believe the scientists at CERN are talking all the precautions they should be in order to protect human life.”
 
James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, insists the LHC poses no risk to the safety of the planet, despite the large amounts of energy it will produce.
 
He said: “The case before the European Court of Human Rights contains the same arguments that we have seen before and we have answered these in extensive safety reports.
 
“The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not already happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays.  If they were dangerous we would know about it already.”
 
A spokesperson for the European Court of Human Rights said the petition to obtain an emergency injunction against CERN was rejected. She added: “There will therefore be no bar to CERN carrying out these experiments but the applicants can continue with their case.”
 
Not surprisingly, when fears are aroused, the Americans join in.  Environmentalists, retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and science writer Luis Sancho, also filed a suit, in a federal court in Hawaii, in attempt to delay LHC being switched on. 
 
The LHC seeks to recreate, for a split second, the conditions that existed in the moments immediately after the birth of the universe, the Big Bang.  In a space a billion times smaller than a speck of dust, the collisions will create temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.
 
It is hoped the experiment, by means of the powerful collisions evenutally produced, will confirm the Higgs bosun, a theoretical new particle proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s.  This hypothetical entity gives mass to every other particle in the universe and has been dubbed the “God Particle.”

My surprise is that it is environmentalists rather than creationists bringing this suit.  An experiment such as this one will surely have the religious right clutching their Bibles and shouting, “Blasphemy! Blasphemy!” 
 
On Tuesday, in a Honolulu courtroom, District Judge Helen Gillmor presided over a 55-minute hearing.  She agreed with the federal government’s claim that it is immune from any legal action based on European legal documents.  A temporary injunction to stop the CERN project was not granted.

Even if the U.S. lawsuit is ultimately successful, the experiment will still go ahead but possibly without American participation.

“The U.S court has no jurisdiction over our equipment,” said Gillies.  “It could pull American scientists out of the experiment but that would just be a great shame for them.”
 
If you suddenly start to get a sinking feeling on September 10 and the Earth does indeed collapse in on itself, our belated apologies will have to go to Professor Rossler in the afterlife.  My money is on business as usual.

[Based on articles in The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.