There was much more of interest like the surprising lack of foresight by CERN for 10 to 15 years in considering mounting radiation hazards in LHC tunnels, which as Meyers also announced, will cost SF 100 Million just for civil engineering to move power supplies at risk. See “Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday” in NewsHammer.

On another safety angle, CMS data from December shows extra mesons produced at 2.36 TeV, 10% or 14% more depending on the model used by CMS Collaboration. According to Professor Richard Shurtleff of WIT, this could have a cause, rather than an odd uplift at higher energies. He postulates a Trajectory Energy added, due to interactions with Earth’s gravity.

His calculations suggesting energies were actually 2.52 TeV and sent by him to CMS, are published with his permission in NewsHammer. They are attached to my article “Scrubbing CMS Data At The LHC” that discusses his work and also my idea of added magnetic Trajectory Energy, possibly demonstrated by the CMS solenoid’s 3.8 Tesla magnetic field acting on beams and boosting their energies as was observed by CMS and Meyers. Also see the lead-in to Shurtleff in my earlier “Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected” in NewsHammer.

Shurtleff is still awaiting a reply from CMS and would appreciate comments.

Other observations by Shurtleff on beam/collision boosts I’ve received privately, are pending his approval for publication in NewsHammer.

Since Fermilab has a special connection to CMS, would anyone care to comment on what the extra production of kaons and pions was at CMS? It’s important as strange atoms could be produced and strangelets too.

CERN is silent on this.

The point is LHC safety. I’ve written 24 articles in a spirit of fun and cooperation that were cautionary on LHC Machine risks in The Science Of Conundrums, before the Massive Quench of 2008. Another series of reports recently.

It won’t serve anyone to ignore risks when it means the future of particle physics. If the LHC has another accident that could be prevented like the one in 2008, it could mean the self-destruction of the LHC.

Imagine significantly more powerful beams and collisions that the LHC Machine cannot control. Or the unexpected production of stable Collider Objects even at 7 TeV collisions? The LHC has already had a beam loss and beam explosion this December. The next incident could be at triple Tevatron energy.

According to CERN Commissioning, there is no plan to duplicate 2.36 TeV collisions. Some test collisions at 0.90 TeV before the ramp up to 3.5 TeV beams and 7 TeV collisions March 30, 2009. Why the hurry for glamorous results?

I’d like to thank Fermilab, Symmetry and SymmetryBreaking for their excellent work and support of the LHC (including major participation in the outside review of the 2008 accident, the LHC Risk Panel and its important findings and advice) while providing an open news and discussion forum on the LHC, which I don’t see anywhere at CERN. Too much selling of CERN product at CERN and not enough interest in the public’s need to know and that includes your own community at Fermilab/ SLAC.

–Alan Gillis

It’s correct that the superconducting connections between LHC magnets – of which the copper stablizers are one part – need more work before the LHC can run at 7 TeV per beam.

In a press release issued by CERN last year (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR13.09E.html) they mentioned the problem of the copper stabilizers. In 2009, repairs were made to these connections that will allow the LHC to run safely at 3.5 TeV per beam – half it’s design energy. More repairs are needed to the superconducting connections before the accelerator can run at 7 TeV per beam. These repairs will be carried out during the long shutdown to start at the end of 2011.

Another good writeup about the problems with the superconducting connections can be found in Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100223/full/4631008a.html). Or for a technical paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/23/3/034001/.

However, some of them – the Age in Australia and its followers – wrote some additional details about the copper connectors which seem to be un-ready for sqrt(s) = 14 TeV. Is that right? Will it be a difficult operation to fix this?