CERN reports on LHC repair progress; restart still set for Fall

June 19, 2009 | 12:39 pm

CERN confirmed today that the Large Hadron Collider remains on schedule to restart this fall, albeit two to three weeks later than originally expected.  A specific restart date, and the beam energy for the initial run of the LHC, are yet to be determined.

After a much-hyped startup on September 10, 2008, the LHC shut down nine days later when a connection, or splice, between two superconducting magnets failed. Today’s press release discusses the cause of the failure and steps that have been taken over the past nine months to repair the damage to the LHC and ensure that a similar incident won’t happen again. The release also details ongoing tests to the 10,000 splices that connect the LHC magnets. The results of these tests will determine the LHC’s restart date and maximum beam energy for its first run.

For those who would like more details on the fixes to the LHC and the systems that are being put in place to prevent future incidents, the reports and past presentations of two external committees set up by CERN in the wake of the failure are available online.

The first committee was tasked with reviewing the LHC’s enhanced protection system, which will detect (and protect against) abnormally high resistance splices such as the one that caused the LHC to fail. The second panel, the LHC Risk Review, examined the risks to future operation of the LHC, taking into account the technical and operational measures planned and being implemented following the failure.

Katie Yurkewicz
Posted in LHC updates |
2 Comments »

2 Responses to “CERN reports on LHC repair progress; restart still set for Fall”

  1. Michel Lauzon Says:
    July 14th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

    I’m an electronic design engineer and I was born curious :)

    Reading about this incident what surprises me is that failure detection was not designed in the fist place. Were you so budget tight ? Did some politician decided this would be cut?
    No failure mode analysis was done ?

    I’m not doing any finger pointing, I’m just curious :)

    I have another question!
    I love science and have been reading for so long about the LHC project, how many years ago was it proposed ? It seems to me it might be close to 30!

    3rd question :) ))
    In all these years I never saw any journalist talking about God’s particle up to the last weeks or so before the first tur on. Maybe I missed some news but anyway I find it strange.

    When I first read about the single electron interference, I guess 15 years ago, I thought that God existed just because of it. The idea that matter and information affect one another in such a weird way just amazes me.

    I also have always been impressed by Shanon’s theorem saying information brought by x is inversely proportional to the probability of occurrence of x.

    So my big question is there an expected relation with all these ? Information, matter, quantum mechanics, God ? Is this just journalist hype or does the intuition of physicists leads to some serious intuitions ?

    Please don’t tell me the answer is 47 :)

    Thanks for just even trying to think about answering, I’m just too curious :)

    Michel

  2. Richard McBroom Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    RE: Michel Lauzon Say s: July 14th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

    I find it interesting that you should ask the third question the way you did.

    I have toiled with similar issues on other threads (see Symmetry’s “Code Crackers Wanted” plus PBS’s discussions regarding “Kryptos”).

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