Downtime for Large Hadron Collider - Until 2009

September 10 marked the "first beam" in the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's particle accelerator which will be able to get the most energetic collisions obtained by an atom smasher to date. The "first beam" date (called the "Red Button Date" by some media, including us) was largely ceremonial, although it did mean that the beam had been directed successfully through the entire 27 kilometer track of the world's largest particle accelerator.

On September 19, however, Geneva had a problem. While bringing the final sector (sector 3-4) online, they discovered a large helium leak into the tunnel, disturbing the precise vacuum necessary for the LHC to get beams up to their full energy. (If there's helium in the LHC tunnel, then the proton beam will collide with the helium before it can reach the beam-on-beam interactions.)

Engineers checking the electronics
of the cryogenic instrumentation under a dipole magnet.
CERN

Investigations thus far have indicated that the problem lies in a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. Since the equipment is supercooled to temperatures near absolute zero, it will take three to four weeks for the sector to be brought up to room temperature so that engineers can get in to examine the problems. Once fixed, the actual problem is expected to take only a couple of days to fix.

So why is the LHC going to be down until 2009? Because by the time the temperature is raised to room temperature, repaired, and then brought back down to operating temperature, the LHC will be into its mandatory winter maintenance period. The accelerator will be back up and running in early spring 2009, though.

Besides this one incident, it looks like the start-up of the LHC has gone without any real hitches. What's unfortunate is that the delicate conditions of the LHC make it so that even a minor problem like this takes several months to repair.

Related Articles:

• CERN press release - Incident in LHC sector 3-4
• CERN press release - LHC re-start scheduled for 2009
• MSNBC - Supercollider shut down until spring
• Wired - Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009
• Wired - The Large Hadron Collider's New Name Is ...