Repairing the LHC, 100 metres underground, © CERN 2008
A view down into the LHC just weeks before it was sealed off, 2008
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Scientists at Cern (European Laboratory for Nuclear Research) in Geneva announced 6 August that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on in mid-November, following the latest successful series of tests.
The LHC was started up in September 2008, and had to be switched off a week later, due to overheating and extensive damage to some of the magnets.
Cern's LHC, kilometres of tunnels under France and Switzerland
The latest tests involved the superconducting connections between the string of magnets, some of which revealed abnormally high resistance. It was this sudden increase in temperature in September that caused the nitrogen to heat and expand, severely damaging more than 50 magnets, each weighing almost 30 tonnes.
The LHC is the world’s largest machine, the magnets linked together in a circular tunnel 27 km long underneath the Geneva countryside and neighbouring France.
The magnets, supercooled with liquid nitrogen to a few degrees above absolute zero, spin the particles along the tunnel’s path and keep the beam of particles focused so that they can smash into each other at extremely high energies.
Rolf Heuer, Cern director general
In November, beams of particles will be limited to half-power, about 3.5 TeV (tera, or thousand billion, electron volts, a measure of energy). “We’ve selected 3.5 TeV to start,” says Cern Director General Rolf Heuer, “because it allows the LHC operators to gain experience of running the machine safely while opening up a new discovery region for the experiments.”
The LHC was designed to smash protons and to discover particles like the Higgs boson, a particle the existence of which has been postulated but which has never been seen, and that would shed light on the nature of matter. Cern’s LHC and Chicago’s Fermilab, a smaller particle accelerator in the US, are in a race to be the first to discover the Higgs boson.
LHC control room, Cern
Idyllic Swiss countryside, above the LHC tunnels
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 7 August 2009.
Filed under: Tech/media
Tags: border, Cern, Education, Fermilab, France, Geneva, Geneva news, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, liquid helium, nuclear research, particle beams, proton, science, Society, supercooled magnets, Swiss news, Switzerland, TeV
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October 11th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
[...] in the border area near Geneva. The LHC was stopped shortly after it started in September 2008 but Cern expects to start it again in November [...]