Never fear, the LHC hasn’t gone workshy on us; this is the first of 3 planned “technical stops” of 2015 that give CERN engineers a chance to carry out maintenance tasks.
As described in a recent LHC news update, powering up the world’s largest particle accelerator after being shut down since 2013 for an upgrade isn’t as simple as “pressing a button.” In the build-up to Run 2, that officially began this month, recommissioning of the particle beam actually began in early April and the whole system was cryogenically cooled at the end of 2014.
In short, just because science wasn’t being carried out for the majority of the past few months, the LHC has been an engineering beast and work on the 17 mile ring of superecooled electromagnets and complex experiments never slowed down.
“The accelerator is made up of thousands of components that all have to work together harmoniously and need to be re-tuned at regular intervals,” writes the LHC news release. “Each year of LHC operation therefore includes five-day technical stops every ten weeks or so. The experiments take advantage of these intervals to carry out their own maintenance work.”
During this technical stop, several days will be dedicated to “scrubbing the beam pipes” in preparation for an increase in the accelerator’s luminosity in this higher-energy regime. Also, while one of the LHC’s smallest experiments (LHCf) gets dismantled for maintenance, there will be a low-energy beam run that will be used by the other experiments for calibration purposes while avoiding high-energy damage to the dismantled LHCf detector.
Read more at Discovery News
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