Giant Particle Collider Struggles – Hadron Collider
Giant Particle Collider Struggles
The New York Times
The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. 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 across the ocean.
MSN
The planned restart of the world’s largest atom smasher has been delayed, its operator said. Scientists have to carry out further tests and put in place more safety measures to prevent a repeat of the faults which sidelined the 10 billion-dollar (£6 billion) machine shortly after start-up last year. The Large Hadron Collider was meant to restart in late September, but that will probably be pushed back two to three weeks to October, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said.
Cnet News
After a year of setbacks, CERN plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider in November at a tempo that won’t overtax the machinery behind the giant particle physics experiment.
The collider, located deep underground on the border between France and Switzerland, will start out running at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam, about half the energy that CERN expects eventually. The physicists will inject and capture high-energy beams running in each direction on the circular collider’s 17-mile circumference, log data over a number of weeks, and simply get themselves up to speed on the systems.
Times Online
The Large Hadron Collider will run at only half its maximum energy when it restarts in November after a serious fault forced it to be shut down for more than a year.
Officials from the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva announced last night that it will be 2011 before the world’s most powerful atom-smasher reaches its full capacity.
While the £4 billion “big bang machine” should eventually be capable of running at an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV), it will operate initially at just 3.5 TeV when it starts smashing protons together in mid-November. The first science results are expected a few weeks later.
It will move up to higher energies only once engineers are confident that it is safe to do so, and it will reach maximum power only after it is shut down for a refit in the winter of 2010-11.
