Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
The short circuit that had delayed the restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been fixed and the world’s largest atom smasher could begin operations as early as this weekend, officials at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) announced on Tuesday.
Getting back into the routine
Last week, experiments at the particle accelerator responsible for helping prove the existence of the Higgs boson were scheduled to restart after two years of repairs. However, a short caused by the presence of a wayward metal fragment inside the “diode box” of one of the superconducting dipole magnets that steer particles in the LHC forced a delay, according to Science.
CERN engineers revealed Tuesday that they had successfully burned off that metal fragment by injecting 400 amps of current into the shorted circuit to intentionally blow it like a fuse. Provided there are no further issues, the website noted that the collider may be ready by this weekend, but before that can happen, scientists at the Geneva-based facility will first have to spend a few days retesting the entire six-kilometer circuit powering the region where the short appeared.
[STORY: LHC short circuits; researchers conCERNed]
“The progress is good. The short had disappeared,” Dr. Paul Collier, head of CERN’s beams division, told Science. “We are back into what we would call more routine test phase now. It’s a matter of days, now, before first beam, certainly not weeks… Fingers crossed that nothing else goes wrong, of course.”
Not the safest method
CERN explained that the short circuit occurred in one of the connections between a magnet and its diode, which is part of the protection system in place for the collider’s magnets. Those diodes divert the current into a parallel circuit if the magnet suddenly changes from a superconducting state to a conducting one. The piece of metal became stuck during training of the magnets.
We think this is what they're talking about. (Credit: Universal Pictures)
The decision to inject a nearly 400 amp current into the diode circuit to cause the fragment to disintegrate was something of an experiment, Dr. Collier told BBC News. They decided to use that approach after first considering several other possibilities, including hosing down the area with helium gas or sending an engineer in to manually work on the magnet.
“Maybe the safest mechanism would have been to warm up the machine and go in there and clean it out – but that would have been a very long process,” he explained. The experiment paid off, he said, and prevented what could have been a long delay in the LHC’s restart.
“There’s no short there now, even at high voltages,” Dr. Collier added. “We can’t pretend this is the only fragment in the system; it could well recur in the future. But now we’ve got a mechanism to deal with it relatively quickly – much more quickly than we did this time.”
[STORY: Researchers looking to ‘break physics’ with LHC Run Two]
The LHC is best known for discovering the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is essential to the Standard model particle physics, in 2012. With this highly anticipated reboot, which will not officially get underway until next month, CERN scientists hope to perform higher-energy collisions that could shed new light on dark matter and supersymmetry, BBC News added.
And while we’re on the topic of Back to the Future (that’s a flux capacitor above)…whaaaaaa?!
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