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Initial suspicions that a faulty electrical connection between two magnets inside the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) caused a helium leak that ultimately shut down the machine have proved correct.

Mechanical damage from the September 19 electrical snafu caused the magnet to release helium into the particle accelerator's 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the LHC, said today. CERN's investigation confirms its original explanation for the leak.

"This incident was unforeseen," CERN Director General Robert Aymar said in a statement, "but I am now confident that we can make the necessary repairs, ensure that a similar incident cannot happen in the future, and move forward to achieving our research objectives."

But John Conway, a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, says it's hard to say just how serious a problem the faulty connection is.

"The real question is whether it’s a fundamental design flaw affecting the magnet interconnects or a weak link in one," Conway tells us. "I don’t think they know the original cause of the event. If it’s a design flaw that requires a retrofit of all the magnets, that could be a big deal."

A spokesman for CERN, James Gillies, says engineers don't, in fact, know the ultimate cause of the problem, but insists there's no design flaw. All 10,000 circuit junctions inside the machine passed inspections except for the one that failed, he says. "We know it was literally a solder joint between two cables that failed," Gillies says. "Why it failed we still don’t know. We know it's not a systematic fault."

The $8-billion LHC has battled operational problems since it was turned on September 10: A transformer broke the day after physicists activated the machine, and then the leak occurred barely more than a week later, delaying experiments until next spring. In addition to investigating the malfunction, the LHC will undergo a previously scheduled winter maintenance.

LHC scientists plan to smash protons together to study conditions that preceded the origins of the universe. Read all about their work and the particle accelerator here.

(Image of LHC/CERN)

3 Comments

1. 1. Robert Houston 12:50 AM 11/15/08

   CERN's director is quoted as saying "The incident was unforeseen," but a very similar malfunction at the Large Hadron Collider occurred on March 27, 2007. Then too, helium filled the tunnel, dozens of magnets were damaged and a 20 ton magnet was lifted off its mountings in an explosive disruption. CERN's own investigation found "fundamental flaws" in design due to errors in basic math that were missed in four reviews, according to the Sunday Times of London (J. Leake, "Big bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong," Apr. 8, 2007, p. 3).
   
   That explosion delayed the Collider's launch by over a year, and the Sept. 19, 2008 incident has caused at least a half year suspension. This is a welcome reprieve in which to reassess the LHC. Has CERN taken undue risks in rushing the collider into operation? If its engineering design has led to serious accidents, can CERN be trusted in its claims of safety regarding planetary dangers such as black holes that may result from its planned Big Bang experiments?
   
   A foremost risk assessment expert, Prof. Mark Leggett of Australia, concluded that the LHC project has violated 18 established safety practices and needs careful review by an independent commission of the European Union. In a March 2008 affidavit submitted in a lawsuit to block the LHC, Dr. Leggett shows in a table that all seven features of a dangerous scientific project are present in the LHC, threatening public safety in Europe and the world (http://www.lhcdefense.org/lhc_legal.php).
   
   Several physicists have acknowledged publicly that CERN's basic safety argument, that the collider beams are the same as cosmic rays, is fallacious. One of these is a world authority on cosmic rays, Rainer Plaga, Ph.D., who was a former group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany. His new paper, "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders," which was released on Sept. 26, disputes CERN's safety theorists and now includes an appendix refuting their hasty rebuttal (http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415). He concludes that the LHC may emit "radiation that would be harmful to Earth and/or CERN and its surroundings." France and the city of Geneva may be in serious danger for, according to Plaga, "a micro black hole created with very small...velocities in a collider would appear like a major nuclear explosion in the immediate vicinity of the collider."
   
   

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3. 3. eletrochave 01:21 PM 1/10/10

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