I read that CERN is going to try to do repairs over the winter and around March/April, start up the series of injectors leading to the LHC, and start the LHC around May, resuming where they left off, with about 2 months of additional testing before doing collisions. That means energetic proton collisions next summer.
But I doubt it.
The problem is much more serious, I believe.
They still haven’t started the warm-up of Sector 3-4 for repairs. And they’re having difficulty maintaining the temperature of some of the magnets [both ends of the sector are slowly warming, and this is not part of an intentional warming, rather they are trying to maintain their cool [pun intended!], as the bulk of the non-quenched magnets remain cool and are not being warmed [though slightly above 1.9 K] now 5+ days post-accident.
Here’s the problem they are probably struggling with. Why did so many magnets quench, and are they OK?
The idea is that if one or two magnets quench, it’s a problem, but not a major difficulty. If the quench were to cause a magnet failure, they could replace the magnet with some of the spares they have, though that would be time-consuming as it would require warm-up and then cool-down. Here, however, they had 100 magnets consecutively quench. Unheard of for superconducting magnet colliders [such as RHIC and Tevatron]. And, they don’t have 100 spares just lying around if the magnets went bad. They would have to be fabricated anew.
Here are some more concerns. Did this happen in the first sector they tested in going from 0.45 TeV to 5 TeV [testing the field strengths of the magnets]? If so, what will happen in the next 7 sectors to be tested? I believe it was the first sector tested, as this was a new type of test, and they had just brought it back to cooldown, and they were wanting to prepare for beam acceleration to 5 TeV, testing the magnets first to make certain they worked. I don’t believe it was 7 sectors passed the test, and then the 8th sector failed. I believe it was the first sector that was tested that failed. But, CERN is being tight-lipped about it, so I can’t say for certain. It’s just that it was early in the day, shortly after they started testing that the accident happened, which implies to me that it was one of the first sectors tested, not the last.
Did this happen at the current/field-strength required to curve beam at 5 TeV? Or at lower field strength [say, 3 TeV] as they were ramping up to 5 TeV from 0.45 TeV? If it happened at the lower field strength, what will happen elsewhere in the sector’s magnets when they move upwards to 5 TeV? More couplings fail? That would mean that they have to re-design all of the magnet-couplings for the entire ring - warming all 27 kilometers to 300 K, retrofit all the couplings, and then chill back down. That won’t happen over the winter.
And, what caused the consecutive quenching of so many magnets just because an electrical coupling of two magnets lost superconductivity and melted? That would cause those two magnets to quench, but why 100? Will this happen every time they have a minor quench, have 100 more also quench? Bad news if so. Quenches are rather routine events when they occur one at a time, at Tevatron or RHIC.
And, why did the quench take out the temperature gauges? They are presently not reporting for that entire stretch of magnets [1.5 kilometers, or 100 magnets]. That implies physical damage. That would be an extensive repair/redesign that should be put in place on all 27 kilometers of magnets. Won’t happen this winter…
Add, since 100 magnets quenched, how likely is it that all 100 escaped any damage? The quenching is initiated when it is detected that a small portion of the magnet loses superconductivity. To avoid resistive heating in that small section only [depositing all the stored energy in that small region], heaters kick in that causes the entire magnet to lose superconductivity. Then, all of the stored energy is deposited throughout the entire magnet, not just a small region. This rapidly heats the magnet from about 2K to about 100K [the same energy deposition as taking water from 2C to 100C in a fraction of a second], but relatively evenly, so no one region excessively heats and is damaged. So the theory goes.
In practice, how reliable is the kick-in of the heaters? If there is any delay anywhere, the heating will be uneven. I would wager that out of 100 magnets, it is likely that there was some difficulty with some of them, causing damage to the magnets, meaning they will have to be replaced. Won’t happen this winter…
So, with these serious design problem issues still not addressed in the public, I cannot say for certain that they won’t be back to operation next summer, but somehow I believe it looks closer to 2-3 years if they have to re-engineer the magnets, or 1-2 years if they have to re-engineer the temperature gauges.
This might be a very long wait for them.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:36 am EDT
how about anyone here trying to fix the biggest most complicated thing on the planet in 3 mounths. the sheer size of the thing is a problem in its selfjust geting things to replace or move is a massive challenge.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 am EDT
how do they intend to restore the high vacuum of 10^-10 mbar in the tunnel with 1 ton of leaked helium ? Helium is a noble gas. The ion-getter-pumps are not very effective with such gases… and with a tunnel length of 27 km I doubt it is possible to get the helium out at all.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:27 am EDT
I call upon everyone who loves the earth, and your very lives to destroy these mechanical abominations before it is too late. If you value your very lives, and the lives of your family, and that of everyone in every part of the universe fight for it.
God will destroy these abominations and the people seeking to destroy us all.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:50 am EDT
“And, why did the quench take out the temperature gauges? They are presently not reporting for that entire stretch of magnets [1.5 kilometers, or 100 magnets]. That implies physical damage. That would be an extensive repair/redesign that should be put in place on all 27 kilometers of magnets. Won’t happen this winter…”
Not so.
There was no beam in the pipe. They were ramping up field strength when they failed.
No damage. So Hopefully back and better for the new year.!
Also in reply to the above poster. They do not evacuate the whole tunnel to that vacuum, only the beam pipes.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:20 am EDT
Maybe it will even take them until Dec 21, 2012 to get the high-energy collisions going again - ROFL. And “darkness will reign.” Heh.
Anyway, I’m glad we all get a reprieve for now. Based on the massive failure of their engineering designs, how can we trust them about the safety of the experiments? Good lord. Has Stephen Hawking made any bets as to whether the LHC will or won’t destroy the planet? Has he picked out the magazine subscriptions he wants yet?
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm EST
nothing bad could happen. These scientists know what to do.
don’t worry.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:53 pm EST
This talk about destroying the universe is total bs. This cannot happen. I mean look at walter L. Wagner, he tried to sue RHIC.
Today, Rhic is going very well. It hasn’t malfunctioned. and it’s been performing tests since the year 2000. And if this isn’t published the people incharge of this website are just tring to piss everyone off and cause problems!
November 11th, 2008 at 4:30 pm EST
Surely it must have occurred to many scientists by now that if you are far enough distant to our universe it will appears to be solid. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what will happen at LHC when they start the collisions!
November 24th, 2008 at 5:52 pm EST
100 magnets didn’t break, only a small component linking 2 quadrupole magnets broke. Also i agree with Grant. This is only a bunch of uneducated people with huge mouths spewing nonsence.
also the temperature gauges still work, they have a feed of the sectors temperatures on CERNS website.
also its nearly impossable to hold liquid helium [below 1.4 kelven] in a container, the molicules are just so small they will leak right through glass.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:17 pm EST
Since the LHC was suppose to recreate the Big Bang. Could it have created another universe on our Earth?
November 29th, 2008 at 7:16 am EST
im making a stand againsr the LHC because ibelive the 6 billion dollars could be going to a better cause sign my petition and take action.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-the-lhc
December 14th, 2008 at 5:33 pm EST
Dr. Wagner,
Without any facts, your analysis about the operational time frame is dead on. This shows your excellent analytical skills. This is why you made me think about the grim prospect of the LHC.
December 26th, 2008 at 4:37 pm EST
What’s it like to be the biggest fucking moron on the face of the Earth?
December 27th, 2008 at 7:25 pm EST
Hello!
I’m just curious what the fine folks at LHC Defense make of this (http://shouldersofgiantmidgets.blogspot.com/2008/10/return-of-radiation-man.html) article. (The same ‘Walter Wager’ who is quoted as an ‘expert’ on this site own the domain name. Now why wouldn’t he want you knowing that he is the one who writes this crap? Hmmm…)
Oh, and for all the arm-chair physicists on this site ruining a discipline by trying to sound smart: you are an imbecilic waste of life.
Cheers
December 31st, 2008 at 7:39 am EST
Hi @ all
Maybe i can help you out with some few questions. I´m a physicists and my speciality is acceleratorphysics…….
Ok, im in Europe and partly working on LHC…..
Maybe I answer some questions I saw above…:
1) The Quench startet at the connection between the magnets. This means, that a small resistance grows while abaout 7 kA are applied. So this leads to a voltage and an lightning wich destroyed some cooling pipes. This is how the Helium escaped into the tunnel and the other magnets couldn´t be cooled. That´s why they quenched.
2) After the release of severall amounts of tons of helium, it had to be pumped out, before anything else can be done. Cause if the sector will be warmed up before the gas was pumped out, it will increase its volume and could destroy otherthings. thats why it took so long to heat it up.
3) The Quench protection systems are quit accurate. I saw some datas. Yeah, you´re right, we dont have 100 Magntes spare. But we don´t need them. The reason of the wrong connection has been found. As far as I know, they don´t believe its happening again. Ok, they are mysterious about the reason, but I think, its more like a “beerbottle at LEP” thing, than a design error. ( With this, I mean the fact, that for the last weeks of LEP, a technician stuck a beerbootle in the beam pipe, which destroyed every possibility of interaction in the detectors. They didn´t know why, and only during dissambling LEP, htey found it)
4) The vacuum ist for 27 Km around the tunnel, the beam pipe has a diameter of about 4-5cm. It´s the same thing, pumping the air out of the beampipe or the church of genf (it,s nearly the same volume).
They don´t just pump the gases out of the hole pipe. They have their sections, pre pumping of the vacuum. letting noble gas in, heating it. There is a special procedure to bring a beampipe in operatingstate from assembling to operating. If you would like to know details of LHC, see the technical design report.
(Vacuum System: https://edms.cern.ch/file/445860/3/Vol_1_Chapter_12.pdf)
5) And my personal favorite: The Black Hole
Ok. I have to admit, that we have only heuristic arguments, that, if a black hole could be created, the earth will not be destroyed. But they are really good. I calculated some things on my own to be sure.
And even if the BH is created (We need 10 Dimensions, that an energy of 1 TeV is enough to create one. If we have only 4 dimensionen, 10^16 TeV is needed. That we have 6 extradimensions is an vast assumption, which is not proved yet) the Hawking-Radiation predicts its decay. And even if they are stable after creating, than you shouldnt forget the high energetic protons hitting protons in the atmosphere. Oh, ok. The resulting black hole would travel with a velocity near c, so it will pass our earth and we would see no interactions. Ok, but what with neutron-stars. Same situation, but much higher density. The black hole can´t fly through that. And searches have been made for BH long before people discussed them at LHC. And I tell you what, even the people, who whished to find them, didnt´t find them at neutron-stars.
I think, I answered a lot of questions. But I´m no sure, if you would agree. And one last thing about the BH: of course, we can´t tell, what will happen. If we could, we didn+t need to try. But we minimized the dangers. And if you stick with your BH, you also have to say: I belive in 10 dimensions. Cause the calculations about this have been done with 10 dimensions. And if they exist… we don´t know the exact influence, but by more dimensions we have, the weaker the gravity gets. So, I think, i could happen something at LHC. But nothing that destroys the world.
Or anyway. As a good samurai, you always should face situations, like got stroke by a lightning or die in a fire, and prepare for death. otherwise, your live will be full of fear
Greetings
Marc
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:51 am EST
I don’t know why they wanna find out so bad what made the Earth, And I’m pretty sure when they get the answer they want, they’re gunna wish they hadn’t. They’re going to cause Switzerland to have holes,And you can finally say that everything there is Swiss >>;
January 4th, 2009 at 6:31 am EST
Struth… With hundreds if not thousands of some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet contributing to a machine’s operation, do any of you think that the blundering ignorances of the readers and writers here could possibly pass comment on the safety or otherwise of the system? You’d do better to engage intelligently with the proper CERN forums, rather than spout off on a site like this.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:13 am EST
CERN cannot maintain basic engineering issues yet we’re supposed to entrust the fate of the entire planet to these newton/einstein hallucinating incompetents at CERN? Not.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:10 pm EST
What happened to the one being built in Texas in the 1960’s?
January 28th, 2009 at 12:15 am EST
Don’t worry the counter EMF generated in the proton collisions will destroy the magnets every time. It will never work at those power levels the way it is currently designed. It dose not use a resonant tuned circuit to dampen out the oscillations produced in the collision of the protons.Instead it uses pulsed DC current or simply brute force to operate.This problem was well known back in the 1960’s and they simply ignored it.The Tokamac has the same exact design problem. They will wast millions of dollars and years of research just trying to get the thing to work. It is simply a pork barrel project.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:38 pm EST
Here is the crux of the whole matter. Either there is a creator of the universe or there is not. If you do not believe in a creator then you may be right the people of this world will destroy themselves. If, however, there is, and I would maintain that Jesus is his son, then the answer is very clearly printed in the text of the Bible. The world will be destroyed by fire sometime after his 1000 year reign, which has not yet occured.
February 17th, 2009 at 6:58 pm EST
The Los Alamos physicists, during WW II, calculated that the first detonation of an atomic “bomb”~ above ground~ MIGHT possibly ignite and destroy the Earth’s atmosphere, but that the risk was statistically low. So they risked the fate of all life on the planet for their detached pursuit of “pure” knowledge, fleeting Nobel glory, an offshoot of military power and their future career advancements.
The CERN crew are of this same abstracted mindset. Willing to gamble the lives of all sentient beings on the globe for a kind of desiccated knowledge ~that may erase our species in an miscalculated black hole “event”~ to satisfy an disconnected form of curiosity that has no moral underpinnings ~and may misguidedly end all knowledge. Simply to slake this unrestrained urge for prying into Everything~ with our primate paws~ in order to cobble together a “more perfect” approximiation of what must always (thanks to the quantum fundmentals) be an Ever-Receding Approximation.
Searching their souls, and examining their moral nature, and exploring their philosophical core, and plumbing psychological motivations is more pressing a scientific task, at present, than the stripping bare of one more layer of an infinite, possibility genocidally-deadly pearl.
Caution is a more rational course than this capricious, mortally-threatening experimentation.
The accident is a “Freudian slip”, of sorts. Or a Heisenbergian hiccough.
We may survive thanks to such unconscious resistence.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:15 am EST
you are all so retarded
i cant believe you guys would actually think that something bad is going to happen. nothing bad is going to happen. your all just so bored with your lives you have to be scared of something. these are the greatest minds in the world working on this thing, i think the scientists can handle it.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:05 pm EST
Yes i agree with rationale guy. Your all a bunch of fucks who believe in retarded conspiracy theories stop worrying about the LHC cause if it does create a black hole we wont know its coming we will be dead in a second, so worry about something more useful you fucking retards maybe “the recession”! you fucks!
February 25th, 2009 at 7:05 pm EST
Dear Readers,
I believe that the development of the LHC program is without a doubt the work of Satan on Earth. It is a perfect example of the coming apocalypse and without a doubt is being built by atheists and devil-worshippers. The only way to trully remedy the situation is to perform a mass exorcism of the scientists associated with it and to cleanse the Earth of this menace. The LHC is clearly trying to “accelerate” the invevitable apocalypse and destruction of religion.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:07 pm EST
How very right you are, the inevitable apocalypse may just come before we are expecting it, i believe that this is the work of satans worshipers trying to manufacture the end of the world before it’s time. May these satanic worshipers be struck by lightning so that they may burn in hell under his crushing grasp. However God’s hand will provail over them destroy there attempts on Christianity. They are just as bad as the terrorist. The LHC must be exposed for what these devil worshipers are trying to achive, otherwise it will ultimately be the end. We pray to the lord!