Leaking Helium Forces a Shut-Down at LHC
“We are not going to be done with this before the winter shutdown, so there will be no more beam in the LHC this year,” Gillies told The Associated Press. “The winter shutdown will go according to schedule, which means that we start up the accelerator complex in the spring months.”
The latest notice from CERN states they will not restart the Large Hadron Collider until this coming spring, as this past Saturday it had been noticed that helium used to cool the collider’s delicate recording apparatus had leaked into the tunnel Saturday. CERN officials feel that the cause may be “the leak of a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s giant magnetic.”
Two weeks ago this Swiss-based company had sent the first proton beam throughout a full circuit, 27 kilometers long in a specially designed tunnel, which was hacked on the 9th and 10th of September by Greek hackers who successfully uploaded half-a-dozen files before stopped by CERN scientists. Presently, the repairs will run into what is considered normal winter shutdown hours, with experts now going into the tunnel housing to look at the damage that occurred when the electrical connection between the two magnetics melted.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
