August 4th, 2009
Hadron Collider's mysterious disappearing magnets
It’s beginning to seem that the Large Hadron Collider may never be able to produce the gargantuan amount of energy that caused many to fear it would create a world-ending black hole.
The Times reports that the collider’s magnets have been massively under performing. Rather than the seven trillion electron volts it was supposed to produce, the collider, when it finally comes back online - after spending a year fixing some 5,000 bad splice solders - may only kick it up to four trillion volts. The article explains:
All of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion electron volts before being installed, Myers said, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings’ eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.
In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.
That means a lengthy period of time to retrain the magnet, maybe a lot of magnets. And so, the collider may wind up forever operating at a lower power level.
Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. If that were the case, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is on one of the CERN collider teams, “It’s not the end of the world. I am not pessimistic at all.”
For now, they’re looking at four trillion. And maybe they should be happy with that.
Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University physicist who works at CERN, said she would happily take that energy level. “The public pays for this,” she said in an e-mail message, “and we need to start delivering.”
The only question is: Is a mere four trillion electron volts sufficient to create that black hole?
