According to a CERN news update today (March 24), the delay was triggered by an “intermittent short circuit” in one of the particle accelerator’s magnet circuits and an investigation is underway. “It is a well understood issue, but one that could take time to resolve since it is in a cold section of the machine and repair may therefore require warming up and re-cooling after repair,” writes CERN.
As discussed by Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director for Accelerators, any glitch impacting a cryogenic machine is a time amplifier, “so what would have taken hours in a warm machine could end up taking us weeks,” said Bordry in a statement.
Consisting of a main 27 kilometer (17 mile) circumference ring of supercooled electromagnets, the LHC has to undergo a long period of cooling down before the instrumentation is capable of maintaining the relativistic particles in a tightly-controlled and collimated “beam.” Operating at temperatures as close to absolute zero as possible, the ring of electromagnets take time (and lots of energy) to warm up and then cool back down should repairs be needed.
CERN estimates that the restart delay could be anything from a few days to several weeks, but as part of the LHC’s historic voyage to peel back the mysteries of space, time and quantum mechanics, this is only a minor bump in the road.
“All the signs are good for a great run 2,” said Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN. “In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks delay in humankind’s quest to understand our universe is little more than the blink of an eye.”
Having already achieved its prime mission to identify the Higgs boson, anticipation for the LHC operating at a higher energy regime is nearing fever pitch. Run 2 will see proton beams being circulated around the LHC at an energy of 6.5 TeV — providing collision energies of 13 TeV, almost double the collision energy of the LHC’s first run. The prospects of discovering exotic physics phenomena is tantalizing.
Read more at Discovery News
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