Following Hadron Collider

What's their maximum energy potential, is it 750 GeV?

Hadron Collider to be closed amid fears of a very big bang

12-month shutdown to repair design flaw that could break apart world's most expensive scientific experiment

By Steve Connor, Science Editor


Thursday, 11 March 2010

The magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet, built for an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern. The Collider must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year for scientists to fix design and safety issues




The world's single most complicated and expensive scientific experiment, designed to discover the "God particle" and recreate the conditions that existed at the dawn of creation, will be switched off for a year to correct a design problem that could break it apart if it ran on full power.


Scientists in charge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva announced yesterday that the machine will only be able to run on half energy before it is temporarily shut down in two years' time. Its full operating capacity designed to probe the frontiers of science will not be achieved until at least 2013 " several years later than planned.

However, the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern), which operates the £2.6bn atom-smasher on the Franco-Swiss border, said that the additional costs of correcting the problem in the machine's copper sheaths or "stabilisers" would come out of its existing budget and it would not be asking for any additional funding from contributing countries, including Britain.

Related articles
Leading article: High maintenance
Search the news archive for more stories
On 19 September 2008, the LHC had to be shut down just days after it was switched on for the first time because of an electrical fault that led to helium gas being accidentally released into the machine's underground tunnel. The fault took £25m to fix but Cern's engineers found that further work on the copper stabilisers designed to soak up spare electrical current from the supercooled magnets was needed before the machine could go to full energy.

"I wouldn't call it a design flaw. It is just that some of the copper stabilisers are not up to the quality needed to go to the full energy level," said Steve Myers, director of accelerators and technology at Cern.

As a compromise to the particle physicists eager to begin work on the fundamental forces of nature at the heart of the atomic nucleus, the Cern authorities decided to run the machine on half energy for the next two years in the hope that this would provide enough experimental data for them to begin to make discoveries in esoteric fields such as supersymmetry and dark matter.

However, the revelation that the problems at the LHC are going to delay its full potential for several more years is unlikely to soothe the growing discontent among scientists in other disciplines who feel that "big physics" gets more than its fair share of funding, especially when savage spending cuts are being planned in other areas of science back home.

Even nuclear physicists are beginning to feel envious of the funding given to their colleagues in particle physics. "What we pay to Cern just eats into other projects. There is a feeling that it gets a disproportionate amount of funding," said Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at Surrey University.

Britain has so far paid about £500m total towards the LHC, which is one of the most ambitious science experiments. Its objective is to collide two beams of subatomic protons circulating in opposite directions at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.

By crashing the beams together at such high energy levels, scientists hope to break apart the sub-atomic constituents of matter and recreate the conditions that occurred less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang some 13.7bn years ago.

However, the engineering difficulties involved in the experiment are uniquely difficult. The 27km tunnel that houses the atom smasher had to be so precisely aligned that it was no greater than one tenth of a millimetre out and the giant, superconducting magnets that accelerate the proton beams have to be held together with a force that can resist 500 tons per square metre, equivalent to one full-throttle jumbo jet pushing on each square metre.

Dr Myers said that following the emergency shutdown in September 2008, engineers found that the joints holding the copper stabilisers were not strong enough to withstand the full energy levels of the machine, designed to run at a maximum level of 14TeV (14 million million electron Volts). "The joints were not made to a sufficient standard. We learnt how to correct the problem as a result of the 2008 accident," he said.

So instead of running at 14TeV the machine will be run at about half this level, which is still four times higher than the energy of any previous subatomic collider, he said.

Within the next few weeks, each beam of the LHC is scheduled to reach 3.5 TeV and when they collide the resulting energy of 7TeV is expected to be high enough to produce findings that could open new avenues, such as the possible discovery of supersymmetry " subatomic particles thought to be created at the beginning of the Universe but have never been seen.

At these energy levels it might also be possible to find the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle", which could explain why matter has mass and hence lead to a greater understanding of the force of gravity, which operates over the vast distances of space.

But many particle physicists believe that it will be necessary to go to much higher energy levels to find the Higgs, and make the sort of discoveries that could lead to the fabled "theory of everything", a unified theory to explain and bring together all the disparate forces of nature, from the small-scale nuclear forces within the atomic nucleus to the force of gravity operating at the level of stars and galaxies.

Hadron Collider: In numbers

£2.6bn

The total cost of the LHC project, including the £2.1bn cost of the collider and £575m cost of the detectors

£500m

The total cost of supporting the LHC from the UK, with an annual fee of £95m at current exchange rates

14 million million

The maximum energy, in electron volts, that the LHC is designed to produce during proton collisions

99.9999991

The velocity, in terms of a percentage of the speed of light, of the proton beams in the accelerator

27km

Length of the underground tunnel in which the collider and its detectors are buried

-271.C

The temperature of the supercooled magnets in the LHC, making it colder than anything in the known universe and only just above absolute zero

Half Power is disappointing. After reading the article, it seems that half power is still 4 times greater than any other accelerator. But still, disappointing.

I guess this means that we're going to have to wait until 2013 before we can hope to learn anything really interesting. Or it'll be 2013 before they find their next design flaw which pushes back the date again.

Maybe this thing really is cursed by temporal paradoxes from the future.

Bummer.

Oh no, again?

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/03/11/de-mystifying-the-lhc-shutdown/

Excerpt:

Oh good. I feel a quark better about things now. But it still sounds like we're going to have to wait until 2013 before really getting any shot at this "God Particle". Have I understood that right, or are they hoping to find it at the lower energy levels available in 2010 and 2011?

I find it strange that they cannot make it work like a charm.

They keep having their ups and downs but now they are going from the bottom to the top..

So, no black holes for another couple of years. May not be too late to expand my financial planning time frame.

Gotta take special care of expensive equipment.

Can I just say I hate that they've called this the "God Particle".

Ha, very punny.

Apparently they just smashed some beams together. What happens now? I wonder how long after each collision before we get an analysis.

Normally science moves at a somewhat glacial pace when it comes to things like this. Scientists like to be cautious and report their findings in journals and survive some peer review before crowing over results. But with the media hovering over this gadget like a three-headed cow, I wonder if we'll see some nice snap-judgments and conclusions with glaring errors (great for Headlines)

All they wanted was collisions? I should introduce them to ex wife.

That's almost all that's on the news this morning. That and the aftermath of the Moscow subway bombings. Nothing else happened yesterday?

The media being what it is, if Brittany Spears gets a hangnail they may not even cover the discovery of "The God Particle" at all. It's all in the timing. Even earth-shattering physics news can be trumped by random schlock in the headlines.

Rosborne - That all depends on how youget your news!