September 22nd, 2008
LHC shuts down for 2 months over faulty wiring
Update: CERN now says the LHC won’t restart until April. The two-month delay moves the LHC to late November on the calendar, and the machine has to shut down for the winter to avoid huge energy bills. (via New York Times)
The Large Hadron Collider is shut down for two months after an electrical glitch between two 30-ton magnets failed caused a helium leak.
“What we know indicates there was a faulty connection between two cables joining two magnets together that warmed up to the point of melting and that resulted in helium being leaked into the tunnel,” said James Gillies, a spokesperson for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the machine. (National Geo)
The problem delays the LHC for a full two months while the troubled section is warmed up, repaired and calmed cooled down.
The thing that went wrong [at the LHC] is not such a big deal,” said Mike Harrison, a high-energy physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, New York.
“The actual fix will be a day or two probably,” he said. “The problem is you have to warm it up and cool it down again. That’s what takes up time.”
All this pushes back the end of the world, which will occur when the LHC powers up sufficiently to generate stable black holes which will suck the earth inside out.
