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LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Oct 16, 2009 06:22 PM
from the say-your-goodbyes-folks,-the-end-is-nigh dept.
from the say-your-goodbyes-folks,-the-end-is-nigh dept.
Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"
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Science: LHC Shut Down By Transformer Malfunction 293 comments
Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."
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Science: The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate 691 comments
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
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Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Funny)
Where's my goddamned time machine? Hey! Dr. John Bell! Would you quit yer damn' canoodling with 23rd century freemasons, and help me find the damn time machine? I left my electron microscope in the alternate omniverse, and can't see the damn time machine anymore!
Hurry, man! I have some more magnets to go break in Switzewhen.
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Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, we're having a windows 7 party too.
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Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, we're having a windows 7 party too.
Curse you for killing my "colder than Vista's reception" joke!
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The earth won't be destroyed according to Hawking (Score:5, Funny)
Here's what Hawking said when giving his Michelson-Morley award lecture [youtube.com]:
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry you've got some time. They probably won't reach full power until sometime in late 2012...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do they throw in a chair with that one ?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If it's not in operation... (Score:2)
Then why are they spending all the energy to cool the things two months before it's needed?
I don't mean this as a sarcastic comment. I'm genuinely curious.
Never mind. Missed the obvious. (Score:2, Insightful)
They're doing low-power test runs. I managed in my brilliance not to notice either that paragraph in the article or the tagline at the end of the summary. /hangs head in shame.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they do find the Higgs in January, they want to have a LOT of jello shots on hand.
Re:If it's not in operation... (Score:5, Funny)
You mean they're spending like there's no tomorrow? Hmmmm.
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Re: (Score:2)
I'm crossing my fingers for some newspaper to unthinkingly use the "black hole" analogy to describe the glut of spending..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At least with a black hole, if you're smart enough to stay away from the event horizon you'll be OK. We, on the other hand, are surely screwed.
Re:If it's not in operation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because cooling a 27 kilometer long object to 1.9 K takes a lot of time. You can't just keep heating it up and cooling it back down again. You cool it down once, and keep it cooled permanently.
Part of the reason this whole thing took so long in the first place was that it had to be heated up and cooled down again.
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Re: (Score:2)
Permanently is a relative term. Time flies differently near black holes.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well it's about time. (Score:3, Funny)
Better double-check... (Score:5, Funny)
Has the LHC destroyed the Earth yet?
NO [hasthelhcd...eearth.com]
Good. Carry on.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Better put a mirror site on the moon in case.
Re:Better double-check... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but my results differ
http://qntm.org/?board [qntm.org]
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Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm, odd... better repeat the experiment just to be sure.
Wrong summary (Score:3, Interesting)
"LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent quenching condition that ..."
No,
1. it is not to prevent quenching, it is to allow helium to escape properly. Superconductors will at some point in their life quench or lose superconductivity. This happens for various reasons though most are due to insufficient cooling, like the last case.
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
Re:Wrong summary (Score:5, Funny)
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
It's European, not Nigerian.
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Re: (Score:2)
> It's European, not Nigerian.
Ok, 26.800.000,00 (TWENTY SIX MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND EUROS)
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2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) *places pinky finger at corner of mouth* to be more dramatic?
Fixed that for you ;-)
Re:Wrong summary (Score:5)
And couldn't they tell us the cost in euro? I mean, that's the unit in which the LHC is budgeted. Why convert into some volatile foreign currency? Let us know the actual figure, and if we live outside the eurozone then we'll convert into our own local currency by ourselves, thanks.
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Saturday Night Live (Score:2)
Destroy the Earth by creating a massive black hole? Nope, not yet...
Large Hardon Collider could corrupt civilisation (Score:5, Funny)
The Large Hardon Collider [today.com] is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. “It’s nothing that cosmic rays don’t do all the time all over the place,” reassured a particularly buff scientist. “It’s perfectly right and natural.”
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. “They’re the same polarity!” said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch last September, but this has been delayed due to inexplicable and ill-timed failure to get a beam up. “I’m so sorry,” stammered a scientist, “this has never happened to us before.”
Re:Large Hardon Collider could corrupt civilisatio (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think there's a place in West Hollywood you can get that done for about $20.
(Bring a friend for 10% off.)
goodbye everyone (Score:2)
it was nice knowing you
1900 degrees ??!? (Score:3, Funny)
Doesn't seem very cool to me, in any commonly used temperature scale!
Almost there, but not quite. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the whole system is getting close to 1.8K, but some magnets aren't quite down there yet. [web.cern.ch] About 2/3 of the ring has cyro authorization (cold enough to power up the magnets) but the magnets haven't been energized yet. All the magnets have to be powered up. Then comes low power beam testing and alignment. Then maybe they can do some science.
There are supposed to be two big fixes in place now. First, the quench protection system now covers not just the magnets, but the connections to them. (The basic idea is that if a superconducting magnet ceases to be superconductive at some hot spot (in which case all the energy in the magnet comes out as heat), the system dumps the energy into resistive loads, and heats up the entire magnet quickly to make it resistive, so that the energy is dumped throughout the magnet, not just at the hot spot. Last time, a hot spot developed at a welded splice. Second, the venting system for dealing with the gaseous helium released after a quench has been improved, with bigger rupture discs. Last time, the vents weren't big enough, and there was substantial damage to the cryogenic plumbing.
None of this has anything to do with the physics. It's all plumbing and DC power control.
The original design documents say a quench is supposed to be recoverable within three hours. That was rather optimistic.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?
Your not. . . the LHC is localed in Geneva, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The monetary numbers were just converted to USD because the article is written/targeted to a US audience.
*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This begs for an "except for , what did the governments ever did for us" joke.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:4, Funny)
>*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
But whenever we do, you guys tell us to go home! Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, WE (as in the US) have been one of the largest contributor countries, even though we aren't officially a part of the CERN treaty group. The US has nearly 1000 scientists involved in the various LHC experiments, and has directly contributed nearly $600M to the construction of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Plus, it will contribute to construction of ALICE and LHCb, and many millions more in grants to US based research groups for operations and upgrades. And it has built two Tier 1 LHC computing centers (at Brookhaven and Fermilab), dozens of Tier 2 centers, and as well as a fully equipped remote operations center. So, I date say "yes", the US is slightly involved with this project....
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:4, Funny)
Mini blackholes will suck up the deficits.
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well.
Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been estimated that most of the world's economy is the result of basic quantum mechanics research. The money put into QM research has been an absolutely incredible investment. Perhaps they're hoping that it will continue to be so.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen various estimates, but Leon Lederman (Nobel prize winner in physics) discusses it in his book "The God Particle." I think it was even in a similar context - why spend so much money doing high energy physics?
Sorry it's not a link, but the book is well worth reading. It's about the history of particle physics research, from an inside perspective, culminating with a discussion of the Higgs boson.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'll keep an eye out for Doc Brown and his Delorean
Re:Huge Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)