Rebirth of the LHC: The Search the God Particle Resumes

At 11.45am on September 19th 2008, things went awesomely wrong at the LHC. Faulty soldering in a small section of cable carrying power to the machine's huge magnets caused sparks to arc across its wiring and send temperatures soaring inside a sector of the LHC tunnel. A hole was punched in the protective pipe that surrounds the cable and released helium, cooled to minus 271C, into a section of the collider tunnel. Pressure valves failed to vent the gas and a shock wave ran though the tunnel.

A 400-metre chunk of the £2.5bn device had been wrecked, it was discovered. Worse, when scientists traced the cause to a tiny piece of soldering, they realised that they would have to redesign major parts of the collider's entire safety systems to prevent a repeat event. That has taken more than a year to achieve.

Now Cern scientists have begun firing protons round one small section of the collider preparing for its re-opening. Over the next few weeks, more and more protons will be put into the machine until, by Christmas, beams will be in full flight and can be collided.

When fully operational, the LHC will soak up 10 times more power than any other particle accelerator on Earth, consuming 120 megawatts of electricity – enough for an entire Swiss canton – to accelerate bunches of protons, kept in two beams, each less than a hair's breadth in diameter, to speeds that will come close to the speed of light. One beam will circulate clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. Then, at four points along the collider's tunnel, the beams will cross.

Bunches of protons – each containing 100bn particles – will slam into other oncoming bunches, triggering collisions that will fling barrages of sub-atomic detritus in all directions.

The hope is that these explosive interactions will form the core of the great collider's operations and will generate new types of particle, including the Higgs, that will pop fleetingly into existence before disintegrating into a trail of other sub-atomic entities with a new physics revealed.

A global army of skeptics sat otherwise.They argue that miniature black holes will be created and one of these could eventually grow to swallow up the Earth. The LHC would then not only be the world's biggest experiment – but its last. This fear has led protesters to make legal attempts to close down the LHC, one even making it to the European Court of Human Rights. All have failed, though one case – in Germany – has still to be resolved.

Casey Kazan

Source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/01/cern-large-hadron-collider

Comments

[Arkonova]

Nice article, but you may have linked to this page about LHC safety: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

[Simon]

What finding can justify the, not clearly denied, risk of a growing Higgs occurrence?

[Honest John]

Watch - Want a bet, when they go to start it, they can't find the keys?

Then it will take another year to make a set!

[Free Xbox 360]

I've just seen a segment about the LHC on the news and this thing looks dangerous - it's impressive but I wouldn't want to go anywhere near it. There are some brave people working there.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

I saw a program about " mini " - black holes on the History Channel last night. They can apparently blink into & out of existence in less time than the blink of an eye without distorting ANYTHING, so anything the LHC creates when they get it fired up again won't swallow up the Earth.

And to quote the late Dr. Carl Sagan about black holes from the series " Cosmos ", " If you want to see the inside of a black hole..... Look around you ".

The LHC will give us a close - up view of the forces that were present at the birthing of the Universe when it gets fired up again, & at what makes the Universe " tick ".