What spoiled the CERN party

R. RAMACHANDRAN Frontline vol 26, 2009
The investigating committee concludes that bad soldering led to the shutting down of the Large Hadron Collider.
CERN

Repair work under way on the dipole circuit in Sector 3-4, where the problem arose on September 19.
NINE days after the spectacular switching on of the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva (Frontline, October 10, 2008) on September 10, 2008, which was watched by an estimated one billion people and more across the world, a completely unexpected mishap struck this international scientific endeavour, the world’s biggest.

Built over nearly a decade and a half at a cost of about $8 billion by an international consortium of thousands of scientists, the gigantic, 27-kilometre-long circular machine is located in a 3.7-metre-diameter tunnel 100 m underground that straddles the Franco-Swiss border. The aim of the LHC is to reveal the fundamental structure of matter by causing counter-rotating beams of protons to collide at very high energies and temperatures, recreating the particle processes of the very early universe.

The incident was the perfect spoiler of the long ongoing party at CERN to celebrate getting things right – well-collimated proton beams in both directions that remained stable over several hundred orbits – in the very first attempt itself, not an easy task by any means. The builders of the machine, led by Lyn Evans of CERN, and the large community of physicists involved in the six experiments, with its mammoth particle detectors, were hoping to have the first proton collisions by November 2008 and for the physics to begin as soon as data started pouring in.

The setback has meant that the accelerator is likely to be up only by July 2009, according to the report of the committee that went into the cause and the nature of the incident. Indeed, if all contingency measures to make the machine completely secure against a similar incident in the future are to be put in place right away, it could mean that the serious physics will only start as late as 2010. read more