Posts Tagged “Large Hadron Collider”
Source: Reuters
Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the “Big Bang” could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($29 million), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.
Announcing a further delay to the Large Hadron Collider’s resumption, now expected in summer, CERN spokesman James Gillies said repairs will cost 15 million Swiss francs, and spare parts would cost another 10-20 million Swiss francs.
The massive collider, the largest and most complex machine ever made, has already cost 10 billion Swiss francs to build, supported by CERN’s 20 European member states and other nations including the United States and Russia.
“We will not be going to our member states asking for more money, we will deal with it within the current CERN budget,” Gillies said.
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Source: CNN.com
The world’s largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month, is more badly damaged than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.
Experts have gone into the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its September 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
“It’s too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out,” Gillies said.
Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so repairs can be made, a time-consuming process.
“A number of magnets raised their temperature by around 100 degrees,” Gillies said. “We have now to warm up the whole sector in a controlled manner before we can actually go in and repair it.”
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Source: CNN.com
A 30-ton transformer that cools the world’s largest particle collider malfunctioned, forcing physicists to stop using the atom smasher just a day after launching it to great fanfare, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Thursday.
The faulty transformer has been replaced and the ring in the 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border has been cooled back down to near absolute zero — or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit — the most efficient operating temperature, said a statement by CERN, as the organization is known.
When the transformer malfunctioned, operating temperatures rose from below 2 Kelvin to 4.5 Kelvin — extraordinarily cold by most standards, but warmer than the normal operating temperature.
The Large Hadron Collider was launched September 10, when scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. That was followed by a counterclockwise beam.
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Source: Telegraph
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Calling themselves the Greek Security Team, the interlopers mocked the IT used on the project, describing the technicians responsible for security as “a bunch of schoolkids.”
However, despite an ominous warning “don’t mess with us,” the hackers said they had no intention of disrupting the work of the atom smasher.
“We’re pulling your pants down because we don’t want to see you running around naked looking to hide yourselves when the panic comes,” they wrote in Greek in a rambling note posted on the LHC’s network.
The scientists behind the £4.4 billion “Big Bang” machine had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.
The website - www.cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.
Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were “one step away” from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.
If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it.”
Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a “scary experience”.
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