LHC Fails Thunderstorm Test

Nature had her own ideas about testing LHC safety. A thunderstorm last Friday knocked out some transformers at the LHC near Geneva that are part of the helium cooling system, that cools the magnets that keep the proton beams travelling (near light speed) on a circular path through the collider. Technicians have been scrambling to fix the problems, but not before some magnets warmed well above standard operating temperatures, some reaching almost 7K from the usual ultra cold 1.9K .

Electromagnets at the LHC need to be this cold to be superconducting, or at peak efficiency, in order to deliver extremely high magnetic fields in the 27 km ring of 1200 giant magnets and thousands of smaller ones, at 8.33 Teslas or about 200,000 times the earth's magnetic field strength.

Everything about this atom smasher is boggling, including the numbers, like its cost at about $10 billion and CERN's yearly operating budget of $1 billion, with over 2500 physicists working on site.

Reports from CERN today state that repairs were successful and the collider will be poised for proton collisions next week at a base energy of 0.90 Trillion Electron Volts. CERN is aiming for much higher energies never before attempted, 5 TeV per beam before October 12th.

CERN didn't say whether the collider was operating with beams or not during the emergency. If it had beams shooting through the ring, protons could have scattered, further warming and quenching some warm magnets, that might have exploded if the automatic heaters had also been affected by the power failures. Several sectors did warm partially at the LHC. If they all had, in the worst case scenario, beams might have unravelled and crashed down the LHC, causing a catastrophic failure. With the warming of magnets and helium coolant, up to 40 refrigeration plants above and below ground could have failed, usually with a loss of helium. In December 2003, the Tevatron had a catastrophic beam loss and a major quench, not related to thunderstorms.

Some hassles during storms have hampered operations at Fermilab's Tevatron, currently the most powerful collider until the LHC goes full blast. Even though both colliders are largely underground, lightning travels well though moist earth or wet clay, and part of the LHC in the vicinity of the second largest experiment, the CMS, has been excavated from clay, so unstable that it had to be artificially frozen during excavation of the giant CMS cavern. Hence its nickname at CERN, see-a-mess.

Like any machine the LHC is vulnerable to its environment and its own weaknesses, not forgetting the colossal energies and particle collisions it will produce.


News Stories On LHC Thunderstorm

Henderson, Mark. "'Big Bang Machine' is back on collision course after its glitches are fixed", Sept 18, 2008, TimesOnline,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4774817.ece
Brouet, Anne-Marie. "Panne de faisceau dans le LHC", Sept 17, 2008, Tribune de Genève, http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu/2008/09/16/systeme-froid-gele-faisceau-lhc
Highfield, Roger. "The Large Hadron Collider: First subatomic particle collision to happen next week", Sept 16, 2008, Telegraph UK, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/16/scilhc116.xml

LHC Costs And Benefits

O'Neill, Martin. "Politics of proton smashing", Sept 17, 2008, New Statesman,
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/09/physics-lhc-cern-scientific

Tevatron Thunderstorms at 100,000 electron volts

Mosher, Dave. "Lightening strikes, Tevatron blinks", Oct/Nov 2006, Symmetry Magazine,
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000391

Tevatron Quenches and Failures

Gillis, Alan. "Major Failures At The Tevatron", Apr 18, 2008, The Science of Conundrums,
http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html

The Black Hand Of Dr Cern

Not a 50's B movie, but the latest Press Release from the biggest black hole on the planet, sucking up an astronomical $10 billion and ready for more, (gulp) dollars. What an appetite! Even now it's going after spare change. $10 million a month from the U.S. alone. When will it end? Is any sofa safe from the Black Hand of Dr Cern?

Of course it says it doesn't want your money. This monster Collider has some self-respect. It sends out Press Releases, like this one, all nice and cosy from September 5th, "CERN reinterates safety on eve of first beam" like on a snowy winter's eve with a baby first beam, http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR07.08E.html

"A report published today . . ." it says " . . . provides comprehensive evidence that safety fears about the Large Hadron Collider are unfounded."

Comprehensive, no. Stuff not considered, lots.
Evidence, no. Theories, yes.
And which report?

Well the one the news stories based on this Press Release are trumpeting as though this was a new safety study just released. An assumption made by journalists too busy to read the CERN Press Release under a microscope. Here is what they mistakenly wrote about shortly after seeing the new CERN Press Release:

"A new report . . ." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080904220342.htm

"A new report . . ." http://www.universetoday.com/2008/09/05/new-report-lhc-switch-on-fears-are-completely-unfounded/

"A new report . . ." http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/iop-lsf090408.php

"A new report . . ." http://www.physorg.com/news139810863.html

"A new report . . ." http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/544021/?sc=rssn

"A new report . . ." http://www.newkerala.com/fs/b/ai-1621.htm

"a new report . . ." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml

Burried at the bottom is the old LHC Safety Assesment Group (LSAG) report from June, though still not identified as the subject of this Press Release. CERN's PR Machine is so good it could publish the Geneva phonebook as a safety report and it would still make headlines, No One Dead Yet, Claims CERN in a New Geneva Safety Report.

One safety study flows into another without being named and instead of four CERN physicists and one Russian who wrote the June LSAG report, it's "The report (still un-named) was prepared by a group of scientists at CERN, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences." There is no one from the University of California, Santa Barbara that contributed, no groups except the CERN group and one Russian. Yes there is a scientist from UCSB, but he contributed to a different paper, "Astronomical Implications of Hypothetical Stable TeV-Scale Black Holes" and that report was done by a group of two, the UCSB guy and a CERN scientist.

The other safety reports are not exactly numerous, only one other LSAG report from 2003, CERN's first on the subject, based on the earlier RHIC safety report for a small low power U.S. collider in reply to Dr Walter Wagner's concern that micro black holes might be produced at the Relatavistic Heavy Ion Collider in Long Island, the 2003 LSAG report now the basis of the June 2008 update, the last update, the presumed subject of the CERN Press Release.

A few words later, "The papers comprising the report . . ." What report? What papers? Why not list all these papers and reports and provide hot links? Isn't this relevant in a Press Release? Or is CERN planning to send journalists Ask CERN Virtual Crystal Balls?

The only 2008 safety report was a single 15 page document undated, with one addendum of 11 pages, the total LSAG report. There was another much thicker report by two scientists on mBH, one from CERN, that was used to buttress the mBH section of the 2008 LSAG report. Those are all the papers, all the reports on safety this year from CERN. No doubt the whole kit and caboodle was presented to the CERN Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) of 20 unnamed scientists who CERN says are independent of CERN. If they pay for parking that settles it. Five out of 20 studied in depth "the 2008 report" meaning what report exactly? OK, say it was all they had, "and endorsed the authors' approach of basing their arguments on irrefutable observational evidence . . ." in the 2 documents submitted, the LSAG 2008 report, 15 plus 11 pages, and the GM Black Holes 2008 paper of 97 pages, finally clear from a read of the 5 page "SPC Report On LSAG Documents".

All this Press Release blather about 2 documents, previously published in June, previously reviewed in an undated SPC Report, the arcane subject of an September Press Release.

Go back a bit to the 5 page SPC Report. If the Press Release is a labyrinth, who claims the straight and narrow "irrefutable observational evidence"? What "irrefutable observational evidence to conclude that new particles produced at the LHC will pose no danger." These new particles have never been observed by CERN or anyone else. There is no evidence, only theories. But the SPC Report makes it clear that they weren't observing "new particles", but "irrefutable observational data on cosmic rays and on astronomical bodies". For journalists who aren't physicists what are they supposed to think? Don't worry about "new particles", we have observational evidence? We have observed these "new particles"? We saw them yesterday?

"The full SPC unanamously agreed with their findings." But why didn't the other 15 of the full SPC 20 study "in detail" the so-called report? Are they that busy, that the safety of CERN itself and their people and Geneva, isn't worth the full particpation of even one CERN hosted committee? But they all unanimously agreed with the select five and each other, perhaps on the very fate of the planet. 20 men decide for us all. The Black Hand Of Dr Cern won't let go of this Collider. It's mine mine mine! hisses Dr Cern, but we never see his face, only the blasted black hand groping for change.

On To September 10th And The Other LHC Machine: The CERN PR Department

The First Beam injection is an important test of LHC engineering. A single low power proton beam is going to circulate through the main 17 mile ring. It's not dangerous like some critics in the media are suggesting, with over-the-top headlines, The BBC calling it "Big Bang Day" for their live radio coverage on BBC FOUR.

Ordinarily CERN would be cringing at misinformed media hype. But it also plays 2 ways. A successful first test cancels fears that the collider is dangerous. Reacting to the media hype some other media outlets are making fun of the dangers, especially in Europe, a nice PR bonus for the machine.

CERN is turning this easy September 10th test into a bigtop LHC media circus, the perfectly safe collider. Hundreds of journalists will be on site for the thrilling 1/15 of normal operating energies single beam, 1/30 of eventual combined energies. The big CERN Dome will be the real hot spot, with all the collider action in up and down and side to side near-collisions of piled high plates from the giant free all day all you can eat buffet, if CERN doesn't forget to call the caterer. Warning, journalists are a grumpy hungry lot. Don't tell them to eat at the cafeteria. They could destroy it! If all goes well at the buffet, a bonanza of headlines the next day, Surprise, It's Not the End of the World. Not even close. Take your cue from Fermilab's own same day LHC Pajama Party, http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/64412.html?wlc=1220824563

CERN's direct competion is Fermilab's Tevatron collider, steady since the start of Run II at 0.90 TeV per beam or half the LHC First Beam attempt at 0.45 TeV. Still those small numbers are in Trillion electron Volts, enough to burn down the CERN Dome, easy, its only low-tech wood, but it is the media center for the day, so watch where you point that thing.

Still in the hunt for the Higgs, the Tevatron's in a last ditch attempt to beat the LHC. Due to run through to 2010 before being scrapped thanks to a recent financial bailout, $5 million from an anonymous donor and more cash this year from the U.S. Government's deep pockets or at least some loose change behind cushions in Washington, the venerable Tevatron has an extra year or two of life.

Way back when CERN's LEP collider was looking for the Higgs in its last days of 1999-2000, before 40,000 tonnes of it was hoisted away to make way for the LHC, CERN optimized and then pushed the LEP beyond its design energies. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=higgs-wont-fly

There was even a call to wait on demolition and press ahead with the LEP due to some tantalizing last minute results. They weren't heeded and for 8 years CERN has been in a vacuum doing no physics since then. Physicists at CERN have been understandably restless for years and now more so with the Tevatron still blazing. Another (unexpected) 'doubly strange' particle discovered a few days ago with energies higher this year and data optimized to the max, http://www.physorg.com/news139673506.html

Taking its cue from the old LEP do-or-die experiment, current Tevatron energy is 0.98022 TeV per beam, http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=outside the Higgs maybe a few more GeV down the road. Let's hope the old collider can take it. http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=fermilab-says-hey-wait-were-in-the-2008-08-08

With the Higgs in Fermilab's pocket, the LHC, ostensibly built to find the mother of all particles, might be a $10 billion irony, just another lonely financial black hole. CERN would definitely disagree. I'll make it easy for them here, since they don't bother responding to my blog articles or to my letters to the LSAG about potential hazards not analyzed by LSAG reports, like bosenova implosion/explosion from quantum state helium-4, or helium-3 produced by LHC ionization of helium-4, first proposed by me in a ScientificBlogging article, http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment
and now a part of the European Court of Human Rights suit on LHC safety; or thermonuclear fusion of this helium-3 also first proposed by me in The Science of Conundrums, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html

CERN absolutely disagrees with everybody out there who hasn't got a CERN badge. Of course critical internal CERN Intranet emails are taken seriously before they are bounced into the not fully tested LHC thousand tonne beam dumps, where they've been known to smoke some graphite into methane, but don't tell anyone. It's top secret!

CERN has said there is other new physics out there as do collider happy physicists everywhere, maybe extra String theory dimensions and then oops micro black holes that oops might merge into a bigger mBH that might start accreting mass at 17,000 tonnes a year that might radiate some nuclear energy that might destroy Switzerland and might go on destroying the planet until it is destroyed, or so says a physicist, Dr Rainer Plaga, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf whom CERN has dismissed with an admirably quick but short 2 page argument printed on 4 pages, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.4087v1.pdf Plaga's paper on metastable quantum black holes is only theoretical, but can we relax when CERN's counter-arguments, all its safety studies are also all based on theories?

In the final analysis, the only practical analysis, CERN's implied LHC safety rests on one point rattling around somewhere behind their theories: So far no major threats have been found in the operation of tiny colliders using low energies.

For now it's theories versus theories, smoke and mirrors, from both sides of the question: Is The LHC Safe? Later this October with a big do-or-die totally unnecessary quantum jump in energy to the first LHC 5 TeV beam, way way more powerful than any collider's on the planet, that might all change.

Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of CERN says: "In any case, they will only send the hadrons in one direction this week. The collisions start in October. Until then, at least, we're not all doomed." Or last chance to visit Geneva or buy a Rolex. Quote from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-large-hadron-collider-end-of-the-world-or-gods-own-particle-921540.html

No, not the end September 10th, of the end of the world debate, maybe equipment failure, collider damage or something more surprising. Like basic nuclear physics they don't know about or maybe dismissed at the water cooler because everyone had another meeting on parking lot passes, the next big ski-weekend or New Dimensions in String Theory. (For the demonstration, please bring your own string and sharp scissors are recommended.)

If the LHC survives, then the first 10 TeV proton collisions later this year will be something to watch on the BBC's New and Improved Big Bang Day broadcast. Add a Rock Concert from the CERN Dome, for backgound music and intercutting into the boring bits. Hey Dr Brian Cox, Rock your Collider!

Let's have this one live on TV worldwide, or maybe Google Earth can get their just launched satellite cameras callibrated in time. About 500 miles up, Google Eye should be safe. Hope the DVD Live At The Collider makes it outta there. Might be the collector's item.


For News on the current LHC prep steps leading up to September 10th, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4692222.ece

The Media Circus Program September 10th,
http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/practical.html#techinfo

Fear And Loathing At The LHC,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml

In Desperation CERN physicists are taking comedy improv classes at CERN. (see above link) Listen in on NPR's "Can Physicists Be Funny?"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94357426&ft=1&f=1007

Dr Brian Cox, your host on BBC FOUR Radio's Big Bang Day September 10th 08:30BST, time travels from the LHC, we knew it all along, back to the days of D:ream,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-sex-and-drugs-and-particle-physics-as-dream-star-recreates-the-big-bang-917196.html

LHC Start-up To Shut-down 2008

After the Olympics, the next big thing is the international Large Hadron Collider. There's a lot of excitement at CERN. The first injections, and without a hitch, of low energy protons shot through an eighth of the 27 km LHC ring. Back to back for this weekend they're doing it again at 0.45 TeV with the anticlockwise beam. It's an important preliminary test, kicking the protons from the pre-accelerator loops, into the unknown. At this point CERN is confident there is nothing to worry about. The energy is only half of the currently most powerful collider, Fermilab's Tevatron, in Batavia, Ill. So, CERN's probably right, this time. Higher energies will be the real test.

Now for the news, major media aren't covering, from the current Strings 2008, a CERN conference, and not only on String theory. It's another window on CERN that is fascinating.

Even at 1% of design energies, as Lyn Evans, Project Director, said August 18th in his talk, on LHC Machine Status, we'll be in new territory. He also confirmed that the first beam right around the main ring is still set for September 10th, as announced last week.

There's one problem Evans said quickly, a turbine needs replacing in Sector 6-7, but it won't delay operations. Once another test is done for the other beam later in September, CERN plans to go ahead with 5 TeV runs before the standard winter shutdown. A Russian scientist, Alexander Vodopyanov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna), said recently in RIA Novosti World, that he's heard that the LHC will be inaugurated October 21st, which supposes that the collider, will by that time have had one test run at least. Though beam collisions at 10 TeV, probably will start later. CERN is in a hurry though, having cancelled earlier plans for a gradual ramping up of beam energies. Going from a known quantity, suddenly into the unknown is a risk, and totally unnecessary. The big rush is due to three years of delays, construction and equipment problems.

Seems they would even have skipped 5 TeV and gone straight to 7 TeV beams this fall, as Evans said the collider wasn't ready for the design energies, as some magnets had been lying around for two years, and were found to require retraining for higher energies, though they were previously trained, this batch from some other supplier. Those will be retrained during the winter shutdown, so they can all go skiing. Mount Blanc is only a proton away. That's not official though. Ski report widgets and desktop ski weather icons and live webcam links to the best ski resorts are all over CERN desktops and laptops. Ski weekend emails fly like alarm routines.

Magnets have to sit up, bark and rollover, as they say at Fermilab. Twelve hundred 15 meter ones at about a million dollars a pop, thousands of smaller ones. But Evans added they were proceeding with care, with some magnets not fully trained, not pushing them beyond 5 TeV, as there are always some protons lost from the beams, and that can cause magnet quenches. As we know from the Tevatron, quenches can crash down the entire collider. Sometimes beams are lost, potentially a dangerous situation.

So September 10th, 21 days to go, is not the BBC's "Big Bang Day", as they're calling it, on their live Radio Four broadcast, starting at 0:8:30 BST. No need to panic yet. Try again later this October. For all you fans of micro black holes, you'll have to wait for them too. CERN's not convinced they'll show up during proton collisions. If they do, Dr O. Buchmüller, speaking on The Search for New Physics at the LHC, said at Strings 2008, after the Evans presentation, that if they show up they would be within SUSY parameters, and their signature would be clearly obvious. Keep your fingers crossed so they aren't too obvious.

Make a date to watch the September 10th LHC Sparks and Quarks, starting 0:8:30 BST, firing of the First Beam an hour later, like on BBC Radio Four, either on Eurovision, if you have a feed or can buy an Internet pass for this one. Or if you're broke after blowing $10 billion on the LHC, watch it for free on CERN's tiny TV Live Webcast, better in Flash if you have internet lite, but a fast machine.

The just-ended Strings 2008, the best in arcane viewing, even if you're a physics fanatic, was a live webcast on the same CERN url daily this week. Earlier talks from Strings 2008, you might have missed, including the must see Evans and Buchmüller talks, should be available as videos a few days late on this same CERN url, see below.


References

CERN Strings 2008, conference program, http://ph-dep-th.web.cern.ch/ph-dep-th/content2/workshops/strings2008/?site=content/talks.html

CERN Webcasts, live or pre-recorded video, for Strings 2008, First Beam September 10th, or other CERN events, http://webcast.cern.ch/

CERN First Beam, news on LHC start-up, countdown to September 10th, http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html

CERN Press Release, CERN announces start-up date for LHC, August 7, 2008, http://info.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR06.08E.html

RIA Novosti World, "Large Hadron Collider to be launched October 21 -- Russian Scientist", August 5, 2008, http://en.rian.ru/world/20080805/115771418.html

Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "Daily Battles At The Tevatron", http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/daily-battles-at-tevatron.html

Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "Major Failures At The Tevatron", http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html

Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "It's All About Energy At The LHC", http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-all-about-energy-at-lhc.html




From First Test To First Beam To First Collisions

CERN's image (above) of last weekend's first proton bunch injection, raises some questions for those who aren't particle physicists. If you read the CERN descriptions of the particle beam and bunches of protons, they look nothing like this.

Ordinarily at design energies, CERN states there will be 3,000 bunches of protons in the beam, and numbering overall anywhere from 100 billion to the trillions of protons, depending on how much luminosity the physicists at the LHC would like for each experiment. The pictured bunch according to SciAM is 5 million protons, a far smaller number than would be usual, which would be at least 100 million protons per bunch. And CERN always describes their beams as less than the thickness of a human hair, and each bunch about 5 cm long. What we're seeing with this first bunch is a hot ball of protons, with a big halo and tail, at about 7.5 mm on the Y-axis, and with the halo included, about 11 mm overall, more like the width of your baby finger.

There's nothing wrong here, as this is typically what you get from the low energy 0.45 TeV SPS pre-accelerator that feeds the LHC. Further focusing of the beam will occur later, to produce needle-like bunches, through collimators throughout the main ring. But the halo is worth looking at. It's well understood this is mostly an electron cloud, generated through interactions of these accelerated protons and extremely high magnetic fields from the superconducting di-pole magnets.

But in the LHC the initial halos, that are cleansed later and focused, show some foreign matter in the beam cryostats which is burning, and this in the best vacuum that CERN can produce for the beam lines, a greater vacuum than is found on the Moon.

Recently, Katherine McAlpine, a science writer working for CERN, put it this way. ". . . with that first beam, they're going to be getting so much more data coming out from those protons running into things that are in the beam pipe than they're getting from cosmic rays coming in from outer space right now that the detector people will have a lot more information to work with calibrating."

Of late she's become well known as AlpineKat through her rap video, "Large Hadron Rap", with CERN back-up.

Besides some collider debris, electron cloud production at the Proton Synchrotron and the Super Proton Synchrotron has been an unresolved problem, especially the proton scattering which comes with an unfocused beam. Other pre-accelerators have the same problem.

Looking back to what Lyn Evans said at Strings 2008, there's an interesting effect that might be seen on September 10th, during the First Beam right around the collider ring.

As some magnets are not properly trained, they won't be ideal superconductors like the other magnets, that will be at 8.33 Teslas. Their magnetic fields will be somewhat weaker and so the First Beam of protons will pass through various field strengths around the collider. This also affects the Superfluid Heliums that circulate through the magnets and cool them and the cryostats. As Superfluid Helium is considered to be a Bose-Einstein Condensate, it has been demonstrated in another BEC that an abrupt change in magnetic fields starts the Bosenova implosion/explosion.

No CERN experimental studies or theoretical analysis has ever been produced on this safety issue by CERN. The recent LSAG safety report by CERN ignores this possible risk that might destroy the collider.

There should be some news this weekend on another test. The counter-rotating beam, like last weekend's test will be injected this weekend, probably with similar success. The next thing to watch is the September 10th First Beam, where there is more risk of failures in engineering and equipment. Look for a follow-up article here on what CERN might discover, when it's too late.

Katherine McAlpine also said, in line with earlier reports from CERN, " . . . on September 10th they're really only going to have one beam going around, so they're not going to have collisions until they project about two months later after startup."

So around November 10th for the first particle collisions at 10 TeV.

CERN Confirms Big Bash

If there's no big crash, CERN says the Collider Inauguration will be October 21st, as Vodopyanov said. 10 TeV Collisions are scheduled before winter shutdown, CERN says again, confirming what McAlpine said. And I was right about the second kicker magnet test. No problems. There was a bit more action from one of the smaller forward detectors, the VELO, part of the giant LHCb detector. The protons knocked through part of the VELO array, and CERN captured the first particle tracks in a series of images, showing at least that this bit works. A relief, these card modules are supercomplex. See the preliminary data and beam schedule on this CERN summary page.

(This article originally appeared in the Alan Gillis Column, Big Science Gambles, ScientificBlogging, in two parts, August 19 and 22, 2008, Big Bash update August 26, 2008, http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/lhc_start_up)


References

Gillis, Alan. ScientificBlogging, "Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment", July 2, 2008, http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment

McAlpine, Katherine (AlpineKat). Youtube, "Large Hadron Rap", July 28, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

Turner, James. O'Reilly News, "Rapping the Higgs Boson: Katherine McAlpine . . .", August 19, 2008, http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/rapping-the-higgs-boson-kather.html

Emergency Measures At The LHC

Relax, it's not the plugged sink in the CMS washroom. Not the wacky grad student with the predigital Kodak Photo Flo right in the toilet. Not something gone terribly wrong with Oprah's New Reality, >OpraH. See it amaze you at theOnion. No, the LHC is in no danger of sinking unlike the Tevatron (no kidding), not even ATLAS the Titan, though we all remember what happened to the Titanic on her maiden voyage. Well, the LHC at 30% over budget is due for one soon enough, after about 3 years of delays. The latest estimate is a complete ring cool down by mid-June this year, with a rush on to start the first beam injections at 5 TeV each, 2 months later, instead of the now abandoned low energy engineering run at 0.45 TeV each. Then boosted to 0.9 TeV each and abandoned again. Time to play catch-up. Though CERN says it will be safe, as they will use fewer bunches of protons for the initial run. After the Tevatron, we hope these physicists are always right.

Ahem. High Expansion Foam test at CMS, in case of electrical fires, from 2006, before most of the CMS was installed. With a million electrical connections later, moisture no good. Good thing they don't sell liters of vodka at the Bar Snack. It's a Polish installation. Here you need to have some French, sou^l comme un polonais, ou bien, un logiciel americain. It worked, a proven and reliable technology from the 1970's. Hope they remembered to install it on a separate shielded feed from their substation, in case of electrical fires. Remember the Tevatron. Even their abort beam system wasn't on a separate feed. See the earlier post, Daily Battles At The Tevatron and shimming all those magnets.

Don't worry. CERN has the best of the best. Overheard at the Bar Snack, CMS to ATLAS. Yeah, see a mess, but so what's a postdoc know? When it comes down to proton for proton. (tap-tap) Our Russians are better than your Russians. Ours come from Fermilab.

Midwest Earthquake Rattles Fermilab

In a comment from tonya on the previous post, Major Failures At The Tevatron, she notes that Fermilab did notify the public of the earthquake's effects on Friday through Symmetry Magazine, their joint publication with SLAC. Here's a link and quote from Symmetry/breaking (news):

"Although there were no reports of damage, scientists said they likely would have lost the particle beam inside the Tevatron accelerator if it had been running."

The same article with 2 other Fermilab seismograms were published this morning on Fermilab Today. No mention of another 4.5 aftershock that occurred just before 12:40 a.m., today, the 18th since Friday, although the initial news story said there were dozens. Hopefully Symmetry Magazine will detail these later on, as they have done with thunderstorms at Fermilab and other human interest and science stories, including progress reports on the LHC. It's a great publication. And you don't have to be a physicist to read it.

The Accelerator Update, with a link on Fermilab Today, is offline, as the author is away until later this week. Should tell us a lot. No reports of damage can still mean a whole lot of trouble, like when your computer crashes. Luckily a disaster was averted because the Tevatron wasn't running. But how can you anticipate earthquakes? What happens if you run out of luck? The damage at the giant LHC, when it's running during an unplanned earthquake, could be devastating or maybe astronomical, if some theorists are right.

Major Failures At The Tevatron

Tevatron main ring from the air. This morning's 5.2 earthquake in the Midwest, with dozens of aftershocks, rattled Chicago skyscrapers and homes in Cincinnati. It must have affected the Tevatron. Fermilab Today, published daily M-F on the web, says nothing about the earthquake, as of 11:30 AM Central, 7 hours after the first shock. Point is any complex and sensitive installation, whether a chemical plant or the Tevatron, would likely crashdown under an onslaught of earthquakes. In 1981, a small local quake at Arzew, Algeria crashed down LNG I and LNG II. The plants vented steam you could see for miles in the fiery glow of the natural gas flares during the night shift. No one was hurt and there was no serious damage, but it took about a week to get the plants up to speed. This is the real safety test for any plant, unplanned instant total shutdown, not ever done deliberately because of the many risks. How would the LHC fare during an earthquake, when even a thunderstorm can rock the Tevatron?

We do know what can go wrong at the Tevatron on a nice day. Not easy to find out. It's a buttoned down organization. Apart from the tritium leak made public, even major failures requiring extensive shutdowns for repairs and re-engineering, are not press released by Fermilab, as though the Tevatron has never suffered any downtime accidents. Even Scientific American has no stories published on Tevatron failures nor could I find any other media stories. The only window on operations at the Tevatron, is the Accelerator Update, a complex technical summary, through a link on Fermilab Today. Digging around with Google you can get info on the December 5, 2003 beam loss accident from a paper by Fermilab's N.V. Mokhov et al, Beam-Induced Damage To the Tevatron Components And What Has Been Done About It at http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2006/conf/fermilab-conf-06-415-ad.pdf The only list of serious component failures in Run II, was from a talk in 2006 at an annual accelerator conference, EPAC at Edinburg, by Valeri Lebedev from Fermilab. Here's a partial list from the Lebedev pdf, Tevatron Failures section.

01-Mar-03 Downtime 12 Days Safety lead ground fault
05-Dec-03 Downtime 12 Days Catastrophic beam loss
20-Dec-03 Downtime 10 Days Cryostat vacuum leak
15-Mar-04 Downtime 12 Days Helium leak
21-Nov-05 Downtime 3 Wks Helium leak
14-Jan-06 Downtime 2 Wks Cryostat vacuum leak
22-Feb-06 Downtime 1 Wk+ Helium leak

(Subsequently, I found the way into a searchable database, a new website for Fermilab's Library, Technical Publications. No link to it either, oddly enough, from other Fermilab sites. Go to http://bss.fnal.gov/techpubs/fermilab_spires.html Another trick is to use Title Search for any search term like beam loss. Then you get 33 citations on beam loss from SPIRES.)

Besides the short presentation notes on the pdf by Lebedev, here then is Lebedev's detailed paper on the same subject, Tevatron Operational Status And Possible Lessons For The LHC. I couldn't find any transcripts of the candid talk he gave at the EPAC-2006 Conference, which would have been to a big LHC audience in Edinburg. But the full paper does clarify a lot of other problems like the faulty pressure relief (Kautzky) valves at the Tevatron, responsable for 2 quenches. "Considering this a systematic failure, we replaced the failed part in all of about 1200 valves during the 2006 shutdown." Then a discussion of the second catastrophic beam loss. "One of worst failures happened on December 20, 2003 when a hardware failure caused a beam loss with consecutive major multi-house (helium cooling/compression plants) quench with 2/3 of the beam lost in the ring before the beam was aborted. Magnets and beam collimators had to be repaired." Imagine 1200 valve repairs. Did they call every plumber in Chicago?

Mokhov's paper, cited above, is a condensed yet updated version of an earlier paper I found through the new tech docs database with a different name that goes Beam-Induced Damage to the Tevatron Collimators: Analysis and Dynamic Modeling of Beam Loss, Energy Deposition and Ablation. This is the fullest discussion on the 05-Dec-03 Catastrophic Beam Loss without going into repairs and redesign of certain Tevatron components. The shorter later paper was presented by Mokhov at another particle physics conference, the ICFA-HB2006 in Tsukuba, Japan. Since it's the best look at a big accident, here's a summary for nonphysicists.

This beam loss wasn't initially caused by the usual leaks or superconducting magnet quenches. These occurred within a split second of the failure of a Roman pot in the huge CDF detector, one of the 2 main experiments in the Tevatron ring. A Roman pot is a CERNRome group invention from the 1970's, a sampler inserted near a collision event to pickup particles deflected from the collision point of the 2 opposing beams.

This time this Roman pot didn't obey an operator command to withdraw from the beam collisions. It did momentarily, but reinserted itself well into the beams. This spewed particles hitting the Roman pot, upstream into the helium coolant and superconducting magnets. Two-thirds of them quenched, about 640, and of the 24 refrigeration houses used to cool the helium to cool the magnets, 16 failed. A release of helium wasn't discussed in Mokhov's paper, though some was vaporized causing damage.

Trillions of protons and antiprotons unravelled from the beam pipe turn after turn, a "major fraction of the 1.5 MJ beam lost in the ring", according to Lebedev. Mokhov notes, "The entire beam is lost during about 400 turns (8.4 msec). . ." in the blink of an eye.

Fortunately no one is allowed in the ring systems when the accelerators are operating because of the radiation and possible leaks and accidents, so no one was hurt below ground. Above ground effects to personnel were not observed. A lot of glazed eyes in front of monitors at least.

Mokhov focuses on the obvious damage and what was done to the Tevatron to correct a cascade of failures. Two collimators, a primary tungsten and another of stainless steel, took most of the beam energy direct hits. Ordinarily, collimators very near the beams, are used to reduce the size of a beam's halo, an action called cleaning or scaping the beam. Here they minimized the damage to the Tevatron. The tungsten abraded and the stainless steel was grooved as though by a 3mm beam, though the actual beam might have been less than a hair's thickness. A large cryogenic spool containing focusing elements was also badly damaged, but by helium evaporation and pressure rise during the quench. Lebedev cites Mokhov, are we in Moscow yet? Lebedev infers that Mokhov's short paper also covers the December 20 accident, which explains why there's some drilling by a beam through more steel somewhere.

Anyway, what actual loss of tungsten and stainless steel that might have been transformed into some other particles by the proton-antiproton beams is not discussed. Some of these unknown particles could still be in the Tevatron or some were released. Fermilab experiments with beams shot at various targets might show what they are, experiments either before or after the accident, but there is no discussion of this in Mokhov's paper. Neither is there information on what happens to helium or magnets or pipe hit by these very powerful beams. Recall my earlier post, Daily Battles At The Tevatron, that since there is a lithium lens used in the Tevatron it might be the source of tritium contamination at Fermilab. Would someone at Fermilab please check?

After a lot of study, Fermilab did modify the Tevatron to prevent a similar set of events. Some modifications needed were so obvious that it is startling they weren't implemented sooner, like for the AC power distribution systems. The emergency kicker magnets and the CAMAC Abort controls now have their own separate feed from the utility company's sub-station. "It now requires a failure of the substation." writes Mokhov obtusely, that is for the emergency beam dump to fail. Uninterruptable power supplies were also added to the CAMAC Abort rack. Other major modifications were made to the Tevatron, discussed at length in Mokhov's paper.

No more "misbehaved proton beam". There are other Russians at Fermilab with colorful English. I can imagine what you might hear at the Tevatron on a bad day. Beam is falling or is technical malfunction from data sensor or maybe crippled switch? Can we check? Not in a few milliseconds, Nicky.

Even though the Tevatron is closing down by 2010, Fermilab is fighting for another collider installation at Batavia, the enormous ILC or International Linear Collider, still on the Fermilab drawing board. So far it doesn't look good.

Daily Battles At The Tevatron

A quiet moment at the Tevatron Main Control Room. Murphy's Law usually runs the Tevatron. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Highlights from April 7 to 9, 2008: Booster kicker magnet (MP02) fails. 10E10 of antiprotons lost. Lightening strikes cause store to abort and TeV to quench. Here's the full 5 page report for April 9 to 11, 2008, from the Fermilab Accelerator Update. "The day shift began with the Tevatron (TeV) in quench recovery. . ."

Well, its a big place with most of the aging equipment dating from 1982. "The Tevatron tunnel is slowly sagging." V. Lebedev writes in his paper on Tevetron Operation Status And Possible Lessons For The LHC. As a result, "During 2006 shutdown about 50 quadrupoles we unrolled." And ". . . because of compression of thermo-insulating spacers . . . It took 3 years and 3 major shutdowns to finish shimming for all 772 Tevatron SC dipoles this year. (2006)"

A lot of experiments and projects make for a hectic schedule, over 50, with some 20 centered at the Tevatron. A thousand superconducting magnets, 15 miles of helium pipe, 24 cryogenic refrigerator houses, but utterly dwarfed by the power and size of the monster LHC. A lot of small annoyances, like from the magnets, though supercooled why should they smell? Other strange smells cropping up, odd vapors, but no fires or radiation hot spots detected by biohazard teams. Mysterious and spooky in the old bowels of the accelerators, grimy cement floors and poor light, an aging industrial twilight city, zones contaminated with radiation and off limits to personnel.

The main problem is a plumber's nightmare. Stuck valves, helium leaks that mushroom 700 times in volume from the cryogenic state, nitrogen leaks as the secondary coolant, vacuum leaks from the beam lines, heat leaks usually electrical, and radiation leaks which contaminate the magnets and force nearly all the superconducting magnet quenches. And they quench a lot, an average of 8 quenches per month in 2006, down from 16 per month in 2001.

Even the roof leaks at the Meson Lab. And when there's a prairie thunderstorm it's pandemonium. Power and communications disrupted. Fire alarms triggered all over dozens of buildings. Even without a direct hit the lightening surging through the ground can terminate the Tevatron beam, an emergency situation, an instant beam dump or its 2 beams drilling holes through anything. Wacky? No, it already happened at the Tevatron twice in December, 2003. A catastrophic beam loss. Ron Moore, Tevatron Department Head, Beams Division, referring to one of the beam loss accidents, recently said ". . . the high energy causes damage even within short time periods. Within 16 nanoseconds, one beam burned through about 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) of solid steel."

The Tevatron's Main Injector ring has had an intermittent beam loss problem with a neutrino beam that's fired underground to a target detector in an abandoned mine in northern Minnesota, the Soudan mine, 735 km away. Not science fiction either, but you need Fermilab authorization before you can access the failure data. There's just a note published in Fermilab Today of December 7, 2006. "NuMI (Neutrino Main Injector) suffers intermittent beam loss when MI stashes" occurring December 4-6. The NuMI-MINOS project on neutrino physics is a big one that will probably go on without the old Tevatron, only the new Main Injector required to produce the beam.

The big worry is radiation contamination, like tritium, usually found in nuclear power plant cooling water and then your local river. Fermilab also relies on water cooling for certain elements of the Tevatron, even collecting rainwater for some of their needs. It's an eco friendly gesture. In November 2005, low levels of tritium were found in the waters around Fermilab, in Indian Creek and ponds on the site. First time in 30 years. But don't forget that 2 years before, the Tevatron had at least two beam accidents in 2003, the December 5 hit that quenched two-thirds of its superconducting magnets, and later that month, the December 20 failure about as serious. But how could radioactive tritium have been produced from protons (even though extracted from hydrogen) and antiprotons (from nickel), unless one or the other acted on something else, producing neutrons then acting on boron or lithium to make tritium. It's up to Fermilab to find out how this happened. All they have been doing is taking water samples. How about some basic research? Well almost. They did locate the tritium leak, a pipe from Fermilab connecting two cooling ponds. Fermilab says the problem is fixed with no further tritium detected. But where is the tritium that was discharging into the ponds? Still in the Tevatron system? And how was tritium produced in the first place? According to Lebedev in the same paper cited above on page 5, there is a lithium lens, apparently in the Debuncher. Lebedev adds that the lithium lens was to be upgraded by 2007. So was it damaged then? Transformed into tritium? No analysis provided by Lebedev.

There are many lessons here for the LHC just in Lebedev's 5 page paper. No doubt CERN is fully aware of them and have revised their engineering and operations with Fermilab's help. The problem is CERN is not building a new and better Tevatron, but a much bigger machine with energies surpassing the Tevatron's beam by an enormous factor of 150.

Two reassuring things though. On the main desk at the Main Control Room, a lowtech box of Puffs and a flashlight. Click to enlarge.

The Tevatron Connection

An impression of Stonehenge in Fermilab's 6,800 acre physics park, Batavia Illinois. The 4 mile ring of the Tevatron collider with a 2 mile main injector ring is underground. If any collider can give us an idea of what to expect from the LHC, it is the Tevatron, first commissioned in 1983 and updated over the years. Run II started in March of 2001 with the new injector, but no major discoveries were made. The Tevatron as a proton-antiproton collider has been amped about as far as it can go and in 2009 or 2010, it will shut down. Another 200 staff out of 1900 are being laid off this spring. There will be no American replacement, though other projects at Fermilab in R&D and astrophysics will go on.

This is a surprising first for the USA. Instead of bigger and better, always at the leading edge in any field, the federal government has tossed its physicists into the LHC ring, about 700 of them with over $500 million as a cushion, actually a great deal. The Americans are the largest contingent at the LHC, about as many as the French and Italians combined. It might not be as fabulous as your own super expensive Super Collider in Texas, scrapped after $2 billion to dig most of the ring, but Congress wasn't convinced that the project had any real benefits. It now has, if the rumor is true, that mushroom growers have moved in.

And so the Tevatron will live on in spirit at the LHC. Since the days of the LEP collider at CERN, there's been a close collaboration going on with Fermilab. Much of the LHC design was pioneered at the Tevatron and many of Fermilab's physicists and engineers have already found jobs, noteably at the CMS, and other LHC experiments. This is a terrific bonus for CERN. Through its long history the Tevatron has been frought with problems, including at least 2 major accidents, both involving a beam loss in 2003. Hopefully they've been designed out at the LHC, but the Americans will have the know-how just in case.

The Tevatron has also made several key discoveries in particle physics and confirmed some of CERN's work on producing antihydrogen antimatter. In 1977 Fermilab detected the bottom quark, the top quark in 1995, and the tau neutrino in 2000. The Higgs has eluded them or maybe a few Higgs bosons are buried in all the messy data. But even though its days are numbered, the Tevatron is ramping up the search to 160 GeV. It's a matter of pride. Go out in a blaze of glory. Still the odds are way better with more juice at the LHC, 150 times more.

But success can also come packaged with errors and failures. Inevitable when you're working on something new, even on a variant of a focusing magnet you know well. Fermilab designed and built 16 huge superconducting magnets for the LHC, about $1 million each. With all their experience, a design error lead to failure of one inner triplet last March, 2007. During a 20 atmosphere pressure test, it exploded when its pipe support broke, releasing a cloud of helium coolant at the LHC. Luckily no one was nearby. The damaged triplet was replaced and the others modified, adding more costs and delays.

Another Big Bang

Billboard at the Geneva Airport. Or better still, VISIT GENEVA while you can. That's the LHC worst case scenario. Or if you believe some physicists, it could be the least of our worries. An unstoppable black hole produced right here could swallow the planet and maybe the Universe. Not yet anyway, probably not this summer when the Large Hadron Collider ring is fully commissioned. Possibly during the less dangerous 14 TeV proton to proton collisions soon after, or more likely eleven months later, when lead ion streams instead of lighter protons, are accelerated and forced to smash into each other at nearly twice the speed of light. Collision energies will be about 82 times higher, or 1,150 TeV.

Of course there is the conventional wisdom of more than 2,000 physicists on site, and another 6,000 accredited in 38 countries, working on this biggest machine of all time, who don't think it's that dangerous or probably not at all dangerous. The only certain thing, is nothing on this scale of a 27 km $10 billion experiment and at terascale 14 TeV energies of 14 trillion electron volts, has ever been attempted.

Add to this, the special conditions of the experiments. As CERN flatters the LHC in its glossy brochures, it's the coldest place and the hottest place in the Universe. Fortunately, not yet. Maybe later this year. Try beating the extreme cold employed, at 1.9 K or -271.3 C or colder than outer space and at a similar vacuum, the extreme magnetic fields, in the CMS experiment 4 Teslas or about 100,000 times earth's magnetic field, and the extreme heat generated by collisions, over 100,000 times the core temperature of our sun. If CERN gets this far without blowing up Geneva, then the LHC ALICE experiment with lead ions at collision energies of an unimaginable 1,150 TeV or 1,150 trillion electron volts, might deliver the Second Largest Big Bang.

In comparison a bolt of lightening, electrons of almost no mass, can deliver as much as 1 GeV or a gigascale billion electron volts. In its heyday the LEP, CERN's earlier Large Electron Positron collider at 40,000 metric tonnes of equipment, hoisted away 8 years ago to recycle the 27 km ring for the Large Hadron Collider, produced energies of 200 GeV.

Fermilab's Tevatron in Batavia Ill at over $370 million, is currently the most powerful collider with a 6.3 km main ring, producing collisions at 1.96 TeV.

The Logic Of Science

On the left, the ultimate portable atomic clock, the size of a grain of rice from NIST and DARPA, 2004. Works using a tiny laser. Accurate for 300 years. A bit of overkill. Do we really need these in cell phones to come? Whether we want these gizmos or not is irrelevant. Some corporation will decide to manufacture them and soon they'll be everywhere. It's the logic of the age we live in. It's also the logic of Science. Actually a simple definition of Science, apart from the Latin root To Know, from the earlier verb To Cut, is the application of logic to all phenomena. That's how Science started in the mists of time when people perceived an orderly pattern to things that had a logic to it. That's also Science's Central Dogma, that the Universe is logical. On this one assumption everything rests. If Science ever hits a brick wall, it will be the discovery of something beyond logic. But Scientists are confident that will never happen, although there are many baffling gaps in their knowledge, the manufacturing of logical theories to cover them is almost as good as having the knowledge they lack, a working hypothesis.

It's these theories that scientists keep on testing, whether it's smashing atoms or toying with genetics. This is Big Science, the biggest game of all time. Of course, Science's parameters are those of the known physical Universe. What they expect to find and measure has to be physical, since after all they use physical instruments. But what if there are Non-physical Universes informing this one or even shaping it? Then they'll never be able to find out for certain if the Universe is logical or not.

Somewhere in the early 20th century Science split off entirely from Art. Now it's all theory and experiment, without a thought for consequences. It's aim like Art's was a certain amount of pleasure and usefulness, like the compass rose above. Now it's an endless stream of data that even overwhelms its specialist fields, and specialists can't keep up, where now a chemist and a physicist haven't got much in common and can't understand each other's work. It's becoming all rather dehumanizing. But we go on.

The latest big thing in Physics, another theory is theoretically we have Dark Matter and Dark Energy, surmised but not yet detected. Well, there are deficiencies in the Big Bang theory. To satisfy them, the known Universe of matter and energy now accounts for only 4% of the total Universe, the rest or 96%, is this unknown dark matter and dark energy we haven't detected. And Antimatter might exist as stars and galaxies where there is no ordinary matter, which would annilate it. Antiparticles have been found, but no Antimatter, though CERN and later Fermilab with CERN's assistance actually created a few atoms of antihydrogen. It's superhot and with no way to contain it, it's readily annihilated in 10 seconds, releasing 100% of its energy and ordinary hydrogen's in contact with it. 100% energy efficient whereas a hydrogen bomb is only 7%. More dreams of an endless supply of energy, except it's way too expensive, at least $25 million a gram.

Anyway, we're in an age of endless speculation and experimentation. The effect on civilization is destabilizing. Some of this Science trickles down to us and now we're living with machines instead of friends and family. With cars instead of horses, with bulbs instead of candles. Are we better off?

Yet we're still trying to get to the bottom of this Universe. It's one thing to daydream. We all do it even those who are PhD deficient. Another to test any and all theories endlessly. But the real worry is Science's destructive experiments and applications of destructive research which eventually affect us all. From one bomb at Los Alamos to a giant nuclear arsenal and a thousand nuclear reactors and no way to safely dispose of them. While we've got our hands full of problems dumped on us by Science that Science is not addressing, a new era of Big Science is dawning. Genetic manipulation and Nuclear Fusion and Super Colliders like CERN's LHC, due to start up in 2008. What's really going to happen when lead nuclei are smashed together in the LHC at super colossal energies never before attempted? Collisions at nearly twice the speed of light? This isn't atom smashing anymore, this is a new type of Fusion Reaction. Even some physicists are demurring. It could be the end of the world.