Neil Turok named director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute

May 9, 2008 | 5:01 pm

In naming Neil Turok as its new executive director, Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics acquires far more than a leading theoretical physicist. Turok is also the founder of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town, which graduates 50 students per year from a rigorous, 10-month program. His goal is to create 15 more such institutes over the next five years to seed Africa with brilliant, well-trained people who can contribute to its intellectual and economic development. Perimeter, he says, resonates with that vision.

“This is one of the questions I insisted upon when I was interviewed for the position,” Turok told me earlier today by phone from South Africa. “I hope to link this work at the Perimeter Institute to the work I do in Africa, because basically there is an awful lot of common spirit between these two. When I met with [Perimeter founder and board chairman] Mike Lazaridis and had a heart-to-heart about this, we discovered we are very much on the same wavelength.”

Turok is director of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge University, where he also holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics. His research, in the simplest terms, involves understanding what occurred around the time of the big bang. Perhaps, he suggests, we live in an endless universe in which the big bang occurs not once, but multiple times–a result of our three-dimensional world colliding with another, parallel world that is just a fraction of an atom’s width away. This work, done in collaboration with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, is described in a book they wrote for a popular audience, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang. You can see a public lecture he gave on the subject here; more details are on his home page, and Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle has a nice Q&A with Turok and Lazaridis here.

Turok was also one of three 2008 recipients of the TED Prize. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, has been bringing together what it calls “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” to give talks at an annual conference since 1984. From the group’s Web site:

The TED Prize is designed to leverage the TED Community’s exceptional array of talent and resources. It is awarded annually to three exceptional individuals who each receive $100,000 and, much more important, the granting of “One Wish to Change the World.” After several months of preparation, they unveil their wish at an award ceremony held during the TED Conference. These wishes have led to collaborative initiatives with far-reaching impact.

In his talk at the TED conference in February, Turok described his African upbringing. His parents were jailed for resisting South Africa’s apartheid government. After their release, the family lived as refugees in Kenya and Tanzania, where he says he had a amazing childhood–short on money but rich in friends and outdoor experiences. The family moved to London so he could attend high school, and he returned at 17 to work as a volunteer teacher in Lesotho, a tiny country surrounded by South Africa. Eighty percent of the men in Lesotho worked in mines just over the border, where conditions were brutal.

Nevertheless, he said, “I was welcomed with incredible hospitality and warmth. But the kids were the best part. The kids were amazing–extremely eager and often very bright.”

When asked to estimate the height of a building, for instance, most of his students set out trying to measure it with a ruler. But one little boy from one of the poorest families in the village began scribbling with chalk on the pavement; he had measured the height of one brick, counted the bricks and was multiplying to get the height. Turok was impressed. An adult miner, home on leave, told Turok his favorite subject in school had been Shakespeare, and proceeded to recite some.

“These and many similar experiences convinced me that there are just tons of bright kids in Africa–inventive kids, intellectual kids, and starved of opportunity. And if Africa’s going to get fixed, it’s by them, not by us.”

All the aid that’s been poured into Africa over the years has failed to put the continent on its feet, Turok said. His institute–created in an old art deco hotel in a seedy part of Cape Town–focuses on skills such as mathematical modeling that are needed to enter the modern world. The 48 students who graduated last June all went on to enroll in masters degree or PhD programs.

 AIM plans to open a second institute in Nigeria in July, and four more sites have been identified in Sudan, Ghana, Uganda, and Madagascar. This Sunday it is scheduled to  launch its Next Einstein initiative at a Cape Town event that includes talks by Nobel Prize winners George Smoot and David Gross, NASA Director Michael Griffin and physicist Stephen Hawking.  It will be Hawking’s first public lecture in Africa. 

What AIM and the Perimeter Institute have in common, Turok told me, is that both understand the importance of basic science in the service of humanity, and both draw brilliant people from many countries and cultures to work together.

Turok says he would like to create a graduate-level program at Perimeter that enrolls perhaps 20 to 30 students at a time and attracts the best lecturers from all over the world, “a highly intense course that gets them to the cutting edge of the subject in 10 months. Visiting lecturers could spend three weeks there, and would be fully looked after. It’s a great place to visit.”

He’d also like to expand an existing program in which researchers and their collaborators can leave their universities, with all the distractions of teaching and administrative duties, to spend a month or two at Perimeter intensively exploring an idea. The Institute’s public-private financing frees  researchers from the need to obtain grants for specific purposes, and its independent nature speeds decision-making, giving it ”a great advantage, in its flexibility and ability to respond quickly to new developments.”

It’s also an environment in which he expects his own research to flourish.

“I have already experienced it” as a visiting scientist, he says. “Perimeter Institute is a wonderful place to bring your collaborators and focus on your work. That encourages people to be ambitious and do great research. I’ll be able to do even better science, I hope, because I won’t be constrained as I was at Cambridge. One does not have to struggle as much for one’s existence. We should be struggling at the frontiers of knowledge, not to get our next grant.”

Turok starts his new job October 1.

David Harris

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HEP Information Resources Survey

May 9, 2008 | 5:27 am

In Spring 2007 more than 2000 high-energy physicists took the time to answer a survey about HEP information systems that was put together by the libraries at CERN, DESY, Fermilab, and SLAC. My colleagues and I have now compiled these results and some analysis of them in arXiv:0804.2701 [cs.DL]

We found the HEP users tend to prefer the systems that have grown within their community, such as SPIRES and arXiv. This is probably not surprising to people within HEP; however, other fields often rely on more general systems that are not as tailored to the behavior of the specific researchers. The overwhelming success of the community systems in HEP may prove to be of interest to other areas of research. In addition, those of us who run these systems in HEP got some much-needed feedback about what we are doing right, and what we need to be doing better!

From the abstract:

Access to previous results is of paramount importance in the scientific process. Recent progress in information management focuses on building e-infrastructures for the optimization of the research workflow, through both policy-driven and user-pulled dynamics. For decades, High-Energy Physics (HEP) has pioneered innovative solutions in the field of information management and dissemination. In light of a transforming information environment, it is important to assess the current usage of information resources by researchers, and HEP provides a unique test-bed for this assessment. A survey of about 10% of practitioners in the field reveals usage trends and information needs. Community-based services, such as the pioneering arXiv and SPIRES systems, largely answer the need of the scientists, with a limited but increasing fraction of younger users relying on Google. Commercial services offered by publishers or database vendors are essentially unused in the field. The survey offers an insight into the most important features that users require to optimize their research workflow. These results inform the future evolution of information management in HEP and, as these researchers are traditionally “early adopters” of innovation in scholarly communication, can inspire developments of disciplinary repositories serving other communities.

We’d like to again thank those researchers who participated in this survey, which has already begun to guide us in delivering better services to the HEP community. You will certainly be hearing more about these new developments in the coming months, and we will continue to involve the community in the design and construction of these resources.

Travis Brooks

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Photo stirs Nobel memories

May 8, 2008 | 5:27 am

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course it’s true, but words paint pictures, too. In a recent conversation with Les Cottrell, it hit me how lucky I was not only to talk with such a fun, passionately curious character (he keeps his patent for an interactive raster-scanned display device and a worn pair of soccer boots in the same desk drawer!) but also to hear him reflect on a significant achievement while gazing upon its visual record. (See my profile of him here.)

Years ago, Cottrell had prepared a presentation about his life for a group of Girl Scouts. For whatever reason, the presentation fell through. The Girl Scouts’ loss was my gain, as he used the presentation to walk me through his former home in Cornwall, England; a trip to China a few months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; stints at IBM and CERN; helping to set a world record for Internet speed (see his Web site for details); and his 1968 arrival at SLAC, where Richard E. Taylor offered him a position on his research team as a “renegade physicist computer geek,” as Cottrell puts it.

This particular work led to the Nobel Prize in Physics for Taylor, Henry W. Kendall and Jerome E. Friedman in 1990.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cottrell and the rest of the team worked night and day on experiments that led to the first evidence for the quark. They fired beams of electrons from SLAC’s two-mile-long linear accelerator at targets of liquid hydrogen and deuterium. From the way the electrons scattered as they hit these targets, the scientists deduced that protons must be made of even smaller particles. (Read Taylor’s Nobel banquet speech here. A description of the work is here.)

A physicist by training, Cottrell partook in data analysis and worked in the control room, but mainly he worked on real-time data acquisition.

“When we got the Nobel Prize, we all bundled off to Stockholm. Dick Taylor was really great. He didn’t just say, ‘I’ll take the money and run,’ he made sure other people traveled with him,” Cottrell said, looking at the photo of his friends posing at the dinner ceremony. “There I am, either holding up or being held up by everybody else back in the middle. We really worked bloody hard. With sickness there were often only about nine people–three were needed per shift–and you would run for about six weeks. It was grueling–maybe you got a day off, maybe you didn’t–but it was very rewarding.”

The photo’s cast of characters:

(Kneeling, from left) Nobel Laureates in Physics Richard ‘Dick’ Taylor, Jerry Friedman, and Henry Kendall. (Standing, from left) Collaborators Arie Bodek, David Coward, Michael ‘Ed’ Riordan, Elliott Bloom, James ‘Bj’ Bjorken, Roger ‘Les’ Cottrell, Guthrie Miller, Martin ‘Marty’ Breidenbach, Jurgen Drees, Wolfgang ‘Pief’ Panofsky, Luke Mo, William ‘Bill’ Atwood. Herbert ‘Hobey’ DeStaebler was added to the group shot later; he was reportedly still getting dressed when the original photo was taken. He’s at the far right in the color version of the photo.

By symmetry intern Matt Cunningham

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Open access: Strong vs. weak? Not so fast.

May 7, 2008 | 5:30 am

The movement to allow free, unfettered access to scientific results is moving along so fast, it’s hard to keep track. As I wrote last fall in symmetry, it began 50 years ago when particle physicists started circulating mimeographed preprints of their work, and got a big boost in 1991 with the establishment of an Internet clearinghouse, now called arXiv, for posting results, often before they’re published. Today there are more than 3000 journals across a wide range of fields that allow some form of open access.

Advocates divide open access into two general forms, green and gold. From my symmetry article:

The green road is what physicists have been doing all along-making their work available on the Web, whether on a central repository such as arXiv or on their own home pages. Activists would like to spread these practices to other fields. .. Under the gold model, journals make their contents available free, with the cost of publishing generally paid by authors or by their home institutions. Unlike the green road, it explicitly provides a way to pay for peer review. In physics, gold journals include Advances in High Energy Physics and the recently launched PMC Physics A, which posts articles in a way that also allows readers to access and manipulate the underlying data… A growing number of journals are hybrids: They continue to sell subscriptions, but will make individual articles available free online if the author pays a fee. This model was pioneered by Springer in 2004.

Now two leaders of the movement, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, are calling for a second set of terms to describe another distinction: information that is available for free versus information that not only is free, but also can be used without special permission. The technical terms are “price-barrier-free OA” and “permission-barrier-free OA,” but they’d like to replace those with something less technical.

The distinction is not as simple as, say, paper versus plastic, because one is contained within the other; information that can be used without permission is also generally available without charge. What’s more, obtaining free access to information is considered an important step toward the ultimate goal of full, unfettered access. So it’s more like plain tea vs. tea with lots of cream and sugar.

Last week, Suber wrote in his Open Access News blog that he and Harnad had agreed on the terms “weak” OA, meaning you don’t have to pay for it, and “strong OA,” meaning you don’t have to get permission to use it, either.

We agree that weak OA is often attainable in circumstances when strong OA is not attainable. We agree that weak OA should not be delayed until we can achieve strong OA. We agree that strong OA is a desirable goal above and beyond weak OA. We agree that the desirability of strong OA is a reason to keep working after attaining weak OA, but not a reason to disparage the difficulties or the significance of weak OA.

Reaction was swift. By Saturday, they had abandoned that position and launched a search for more “value-neutral” terms.

Harnad wrote:

In particular, Professor Bernard Rentier, the Rector of the University of Liege (which has adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate to provide price-barrier-free OA) is also the founder of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting the adoption of Green OA mandates in the universities of Europe and worldwide. Professor Rentier advised us quite explicitly that if price-boundary-free OA were called “Weak OA,” it would make it much harder to persuade other rectors to adopt Green OA mandates–purely because of the negative connotations of “weak.”

And:

The ultimate choice of names matters far less than ensuring that the unintended connotations of “weak” cannot be exploited by the opponents of OA, or by the partisans of one of the forms of OA to the detriment of the other. Nor should mandating “weak OA” be discouraged by the misapprehension that it is some sort of sign of weakness, or of a deficient desideratum

So it’s back to the drawing board. Suber and Harnad do have a list of alternative terms:

Transparent, self-explanatory descriptors:

USE OA vs. RE-USE OA
READ OA vs. READ-WRITE OA
PRICE OA vs. PERMISSION OA

Generic descriptors:

BASIC or GENERIC or CORE OA vs. EXTENDED or EXTENSIBLE or FULL OA
SOFT OA vs. HARD OA
EASY OA vs. HARD OA

The discussion continues on American Scientist Open Access Forum, where Harnad has asked people to send suggestions his way so he can tally and post them.

Glennda Chui

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Collider Queen

May 6, 2008 | 5:30 am

Crain’s Chicago Business magazine has selected Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of Fermilab, as one of its 20 Women to Watch for 2008–a list that includes Michelle Obama; Sophia Siskel, CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden; Mideast policy expert Rachel Bronson of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; and Irene Rosenfeld, chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods.

The magazine’s video tribute to Kim, titled “The Collider Queen,” begins:

Young-Kee Kim is chasing the meaning of life. For many, that’s a philosophical or religious question. But for this award-winning physicist, the answer lies in science.

Kim is a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a collaborator on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, experiment, as well as the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider and efforts to develop the Internationl Linear Collider. She has been deputy lab director since 2006. More about her here.

Kurt Riesselmann

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Read more about it: Expanded US LHC blogs

May 5, 2008 | 2:09 pm

Want to read more about the Large Hadron Collider than endless discussions of doomsday scenarios? Check out the newly expanded US LHC blogs, which today added six new authors to the roster. With startup of the LHC scheduled for this summer, the 10 US LHC bloggers bring you news from the LHC’s front lines, as they work with thousands of colleagues to get the world’s most complex accelerator and experiments up and running.

Like the four veteran US LHC bloggers, the new recruits represent scientists from US institutions working at CERNand in the United States, for universities and national laboratories, at all levels from graduate students to university professors. The bloggers include four scientists each from the two largest LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS; a nuclear physicist from the ALICE collaboration; and an accelerator physicist working on LHC commissioning and upgrades.

In their first posts, the new bloggers discuss why people are already thinking about LHC upgrades, how long it takes before discoveries are announced from a new accelerator, the challenges and complexities of LHC computing, doing astrophysics with accelerator experiments, and traveling in Turkey. Highlights from recent weeks include a discussion of the aforementioned doomsday scenarios, one physicist’s quest to conquer a big West Coast crew race, the amazing precision of particle physics timing, and the intricacies of LHC beam schedules.

Katie Yurkewicz

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Is tea time a waste?

May 5, 2008 | 5:30 am

Over at Imaginary Potential, which is written by half a dozen physics grad students and postdocs, Helen Czerski relates how one of the older academics in her office deeply offended her by suggesting that tea time was a drag on productivity.

…. the loudest snorter of them all actually said “well, you’re from Britain - you’re not used to working as hard as we do here. You don’t have money for the really big projects. And you stop for tea three times a day!”. I pointed out that it’s only twice a day, but my serious point about the work was no longer taken seriously.

So she did the scientific thing. She dug up some data.

Thomson, the scientific publisher, compiles tables showing the number of scientific papers published by country. Czerski folded in population data to get the number of papers per capita.

The results:

Papers per capita:

USA: 9.6 per thousand people per year

UK: 10.9 per thousand people per year.

Papers in the top 1% of papers cited in all fields:

USA: 0.18 per thousand people per year.

UK: 0.17 per thousand people per year.

Czerski writes:

Now, I’m happy to admit that simple statistics may not tell the whole story. But I’m also pretty confident that this is a strong indication that taking two 15 minutes breaks a day to consume cups of tea and eat biscuits is not doing us any harm at all, thank you very much.

The results, frankly, are no surprise to us. having read the impassioned defense of tea-time put forth by Marusa Bradac, Kirk Gilmore, Jonathan Granot, Phil Marshall, and Weiqun Zhang in the March 2006 issue of symmetry. They were looking forward to the opening of the new Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology building at SLAC, with its welcoming venues for chatting and sipping hot beverages.

When a colleague asks us if we want to take a break, we usually feel a strong gut response that says, “I don’t have time right now,” but making the time always ends up being worthwhile. We all feel the pressure of deadlines pulling on us, but stepping out for tea lets our minds rest and helps us re-engage with our work after a brief respite.

Although we won’t get too picky about our drink of choice, some of us have noticed a difference between tea culture in Europe and coffee culture in the United States. Coffee is something you have here on-the-go, while doing something else, but tea is a more leisurely ritual. That ritual is what we seek.

The benefits of tea are many: As students and postdocs, tea provides regular time for the moral and intellectual support we share. But having our advisors present is even better because we know there is a time when we catch them for a couple of minutes, without needing to make an appointment or interrupt some other task. It probably saves us time overall. Also, having administrative members of our groups join in is always more pleasant than only seeing them when we need help.

So lift that cup proudly! And grab an extra biscuit while you’re at it.

Glennda Chui

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The World Wide Web celebrates its third 15th birthday

May 2, 2008 | 5:30 am

Tim Berners-Lee; photo courtesy of CERN

Over at BBC News, James Gillies has an entertaining account of how the World Wide Web came into being at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva. Gillies is director of communication at the lab and co-author of How The Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web has many birthdays.

March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss a short document entitled Information Management: a Proposal, is one.

Christmas of the following year, when the Web was up and running on two computers, is another.

But perhaps the most important Web anniversary of all is 30 April 1993.

That’s the day that Cern put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.

Berners-Lee, a former physicist whose initial proposal for the Web earned the comment “Vague, but exciting” from his boss, was not the only one thinking about new ways to access information on the Internet, which had been around since the 1970s but was devilishly hard to work with. Competing systems included Archie, WAIS and Gopher, Gillies writes. But they were soon eclipsed by the Web, which grew a whopping 341634% in 1994, the year after CERN made it available to the public for free.

Cern’s apparent altruism is deeply embedded in the organization’s culture. Founded in 1954 by 12 European countries, Cern exists to carry out fundamental, curiosity-driven, research.

Its product is knowledge about the Universe, the particles of which it is composed and the forces that give it structure, and it is mandated by its founding convention to publish or otherwise make generally available the results of its work.

In putting the web in the public domain, Cern was only doing just that. The world’s first web site, http://info.cern.ch/, is still up and running.

For more on the Web’s past development and potential future, see Berners-Lee’s testimony to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in March 2007.

Special bonus: Here’s another April 30th anniversary, from Randy Alfred at Wired:

1897: Physicist J.J. Thomson tells a startled scientific audience that he’s discovered something smaller than an atom, a particle with a minuscule mass and a negative charge. Some in the audience at the Royal Institution of Great Britain that Friday evening later told Thomson they thought he was “pulling their legs.”

Glennda Chui

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It must be spring: The buffalo are in bloom

May 1, 2008 | 5:30 am

One of the unexpected joys of a visit to Fermilab is seeing the resident buffalo (technically they’re plains bison, but “buffalo” is the name that resonates; see below.) The size of the herd has changed over the years–there are times it gets so big that some of the shaggy creatures have to be sold at auction–and every spring it puts on a growth spurt in the form of newborn calves. I promised myself I would wangle a trip over there to see the babies, which are said to be the cutest things ever, but dang! It was not to be. Here’s a photo of the first little one of the year, born on April 18th. If I’m not mistaken, you can still see a bit of the umbilical cord hanging down from its belly. While there are no individual stats for the newborn–no height, weight, first hoofprint, first utterance (listen to a bison call here), not even a name–they generally weigh 30 to 40 pounds, and stand up within half an hour of birth.

The first five buffalo, a bull and four cows, were brought to the lab nearly 50 years ago by founding director Robert Wilson. More info here, some of it quite rhapsodic:

“Buffalo” lends itself to symbol, which is the role of the Fermilab herd: a symbol of the frontier, in this case the frontier of high-energy physics, and a link to the origin of the Lab’s site as land of the great midwestern prairie. “Buffalo” speaks of a time of big sky, of thundering herds huge enough to shake the earth beyond the horizon, of Plains Indians and their ponies on the hunt, and of sharpshooting Buffalo Bill. (”Bison Bill?” Don’t think so.)

It goes on to advise:

Although they look placid, buffalo have the undomesticated personality of the wild. Like physicists, they have been described as “cantankerous” by those who have tried to herd them. A double fence around the Fermilab pasture protects the buffalo and the public from each other. Advice from an experienced hand: “Don’t turn your back on a buffalo.”

Hmm. Wonder if that goes for some physicists, too??!

Glennda Chui

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At the LHC, repaired magnets are powered up for the first time

April 29, 2008 | 10:41 pm

Thirteen months after a testing failure revealed serious design flaws in nine sets of “inner triplet” magnets for the Large Hadron Collider, engineers switched on the first of the repaired sets, ran it for an hour and subjected it to a highly stressful test that, in the words of Fermilab’s Jim Kerby, “releases a lot of energy, so if something is going to shake loose or be a problem, this is one event that could cause it to happen.”

The magnets performed just fine, to the great relief of about 50 scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on the repairs and countless others who made substantial contributions. Kerby reported the results Friday in an email, and Fermilab Director Pier Oddone described them Tuesday in a column entitled “Triplet Crown:”

A crown is what the folks who have worked over the last year to get the LHC triplets ready for operations at the Large Hadron Collider deserve… This is the first time that a triplet has worked at specifications (equivalent energy of 7 TeV) as a system of three magnets with all its power and cryogenics interconnections in place. We have come a long way from where we were a year ago.

“It’s a combination of relief and a thrill,” Kerby told me in a phone interview from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border where the LHC is scheduled to turn on this summer. “There’s been an awful lot of hard work by an awful lot of people to get this far, and it’s a thrill to see it come together, finally.”

There are eight sets of inner triplet magnets in the LHC (the ninth is a spare.) Their job is to focus the particle beams into the four areas where particles will collide.

Within each set, two of the magnets, called Q1 and Q3, were designed at Japan’s KEK laboratory and built by industry. The third, Q2, was designed and built at Fermilab.  Fermilab also assembled all the magnets into cryostats and shipped them to CERN.

In March 2007, researchers subjected one of the inner triplets to some of the most extreme conditions they can expect to face during normal operations.  Superconducting magnets like these have to stay very cold in order to conduct electricity without any resistance.  If even a small part of the magnet “goes normal”–loses its superconductivity, and begins to resist the flow of current–this releases a lot of energy in a very small space, which can damage or even destroy the magnet. These events are known as quenches, and while they might seem a bit scary, they do occur from time to time during the running of a collider. In response, heaters fire up and and heat up the whole magnet, dissipating the energy over the magnet’s entire volume so it does no harm.

After the first set of inner triplets failed the quench test, investigators quickly found the problem: Certain support structures for the magnets were not designed to withstand the longitudinal forces they experienced during testing. These supports have been repaired, along with other equipment damaged by the test failure.

On Thursday night, Kerby and his team ran a normal operating current through a set of inner triplet magnets for the first time.  “It went to nominal operating current and came back down without a problem, which is good,” he said. “This is what we want.”

They powered the triplets up again and fired the quench protection heaters. “This is a big jolt,” Kerby said.  Again, the magnets passed.

Finally–by now it was Friday, Geneva time–the crew powered up the magnets again and ran them for an hour.

Kerby, who is a mechanical engineer, has been involved in the design of the magnets from the beginning.  He became the Fermilab project leader in in 1998 and is now the US LHC accelerator project leader.

Although the original test failure was not exactly pleasant, he says, it was far better than the alternative–discovering the problem after the collider is already in operation.

“The best thing you can do is tackle the problem head-on.  If there’s a goof, you fix it,” he said. 

Kerby said it was especially gratifying to see the way people from so many places–including Fermilab, KEK, CERN, the US Department of Energy and Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories–stepped forward to help find a solution.

“That part is just spectacular,” he said. “You call on the expertise of various people–not just the design people or the people to fix it, but the procurement people, who in our case happen to be at Fermilab.  I probably got only a small fraction of their time, but for that fraction they knew exactly what they needed to do, and really pulled it off.” And that, he said, is just one of many examples.

Of the eight inner triplets in the LHC, he said, all but one have been successfully pressure tested.  Four are chilled nearly down to operating temperature, and another is on its way.

 As for the powering-up tests, he said, “One down, seven to go.”

Glennda Chui

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