Fixing the glitches that shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in September will apparently be no easy task: A spokesman for the particle physics lab CERN has announced that the repairs will cost $21 million and will probably not be completed until late June. Cern spokesman James Gillies said: “If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer” [BBC News].

The startup of the LHC on September 10th may win an award for anticlimax of the year: Physicists talked for months about the mysteries of physics that the particle collider would reveal, while nervous laypeople worried that when engineers flipped the switch on the machine it would create a miniature black hole that could destroy the earth. But instead of either of these scenarios coming true, the LHC broke within two weeks before getting a chance to perform any experiments.

The fault affected a part of the accelerator that is kept chilled to within 1.9C of absolute zero (-459F), which had to be warmed up to room temperature before it could be examined and repaired…. It was initially thought that the repair process would take until the spring, encompassing a mandatory maintenance shutdown over the winter period. It now appears more likely that it will be early summer before the LHC starts smashing atoms, to re-create conditions that last existed immediately after the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago [The Times].

Spokespeople for CERN say kinks are inevitable when starting up a project of such complexity; ironically, the $10 billion machine was brought down by the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection. The failure caused the leak of 6 tons of liquid helium that kept a section of the LHC’s superconducting magnets chilled. A preliminary report issued on 16 October says that as many as 29 of the nearly 10,000 magnets used to guide the accelerator’s proton beam will need to be replaced [Nature News]. However, that same report placed the cost of repair at $90,000, so presumably CERN has since discovered more parts that need replacement.

Related Content:
80beats: LHC Won’t Be Back Online Until Spring of 2009
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80beats: First Protons Whiz Around the Large Hadron Collider’s Track
DISCOVER: The Extremely Long Odds Against the Destruction of the Earth

Image: CERN

November 17th, 2008 5:11 PM Tags: Large Hadron Collider, subatomic particles
by Eliza Strickland in Physics & Math | 5 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >