De-mystifying the LHC shutdown

www.symmetrymagazine.org...

Quote from source:
Yesterday the science news media and twitterverse were abuzz following a BBC News article announcing “LHC to shut down for a year to address design faults.” Readers – and the news outlets that frantically re-reported the BBC article – assumed that CERN had found a new problem with the LHC and announced an imminent shutdown. Neither is the case. Here, we join our fellow science writers and bloggers in setting the record straight about the LHC’s next long shutdown.

The LHC will shut down for about one year – but not until late 2011
What the BBC reported yesterday is true, but is not exactly news. A revised schedule for the LHC’s next few years was announced in early February by CERN. According to the revised schedule, the LHC will run at a maximum energy of 3.5 TeV per beam for a period of about 18 months, starting with the first collisions at 3.5 TeV per beam expected to take place at the end of this month. The long run will end in late 2011 or when the LHC experiments have collected a certain quantity of data (one inverse femtobarn in particle-physics parlance), whichever comes first. At the conclusion of this long run, the LHC will shut down for about one year.

The shutdown will be used to fix problems with the LHC and carry out routine maintenance
The long length of the next major LHC shutdown is due to two main factors: the time necessary to fix problems with magnet connections that currently prevent the LHC from running at its full energy; and the time needed to prepare the LHC for routine maintenance and repair work and then restore the LHC to operational status.

Particle accelerators are incredibly complex machines, and, like any complex machine, require regular maintenance to keep their parts running smoothly, repairs when parts wear out or break down, and occasional upgrades to increase the machine’s performance. Maintenance, repairs and upgrades to the LHC cannot take place while the machine is running, for two reasons. One, the radiation generated in the immediate vicinity of the LHC while it is operating means that technicians cannot enter the LHC tunnel while the machine is running. Two, the LHC’s magnets must be cooled to almost absolute zero to bend high-energy beams of particles, and it takes about one month to warm the accelerator up to room temperature before technicians can access the magnets’ innards.

Just thought I would post this as it seems to be in the news and we, as an educated community should know what is going on.

This is a good article to read and tells exactly what is going on with the LHC.

The most important part of the article is that we should have some collisions happening by the end of the month. Something interesting better come out of this because I have been holding my breath for a few years now.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

You know, I was starting to wonder if they would ever get this thing going full speed. Great news, I have a feeling the LHC will show us more about the universe's mysteries than even the people running it expect, just a hunch though. I hope it doesn't hurt much when we all blow up, implode, or turn into little grey blobs. Joking aside, what I heard was that it was an immediate shut-down until late 2011. Thanks for clearing that up, the LHC has always been a subject of great interest for me.

Another year of collisions at record energies before the shut down. . . . I can live with that.





[edit on 12-3-2010 by constantwonder]