Politics And Science At The LHC

In the days before Madison Avenue, public relations and spin doctors, Science was free to speak for itself. Like any other activity it was criticized and judged on its activites and results by media and the people. If the public had questions, the scientists answered them. Political games were for government and business. Now big science instituitions and labs with their own bewildering bureaucracies, have developed an interface to present an ideal world of science through their press offices and lobbyists. They sell science like GM sells cars. Somehow the media seems not to have noticed the difference, taking spin doctors' science press kits and sound bite analysis at face value.

Camera shy bumbling scientists with thick accents who were honest about what they were doing, if you could follow the science and what they said, have now been pushed behind closed doors while the media gurus have taken over. At CERN they go a step further and stage media science events, like the big ballyhoo September 10th to show off the Large Hadron Collider during a preliminary start-up test. A modest start-up showcase for an extremely powerful atom-smasher that smashes nothing that day is played out as a big success and a victory for LHC safety. No more doomsday. Doomsayers all wrong, CERN always right. Then three big things go wrong which are skillfully downplayed. While the little ball of protons zips around, the CMS computer system is being hacked by the Greek Team and that for 2 days at the home of the World Wide Web? A 30 tonne surface transformer blows 36 hours later during a thunderstorm. Then a massive failure occurs in the cryogenic cooling system which cripples an eighth of the 17 mile collider ring. Very little information released, but a lot of reassurances on "teething troubles" at the giant baby collider.

It can get worse. The latest surprise from CERN is a new paper published which finally comes to grips with part of the problem with the helium used in their massive near absolute zero cooling system. The CERN paper dismisses every safety concern with helium without considering all of them in "There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system", September 23, 2008, by Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath of the CERN theory group.

Its focus is helium-4 bosenovas at the LHC and cold fusion during these events.

The short answer is, "We conclude that that there is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforseen catastrophic explosion."

Sounds like these guys were in a hurry, but right behind the Eight Ball. "that that" is fast fast, potential there for a new type of doublespeak. Of course there was an explosive release of one to two tonnes of superfluid helium last time, but that was different. Not a real explosion, more like your radiator exploding, not your gas tank. But the paranormal mindbender winner is, as KFC at the physics arXiv blog said of CERN's conclusions, "That's comforting and impressive. Ruling out forseen catastrophies is certainly useful but the ability to rule out unforeseen ones is truly amazing."

It's a welcome response from CERN even if it is only partial. I first raised the issue myself in ScienticBlogging, July 2nd, 2008, in "Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment" reprinted here on The Science of Conundrums. When CERN didn't bother answering, I contacted their LSAG people via email twice, August 25th and 29th, but included other helium risks like the production of helium-3 via LHC energies ionizing helium-4, where helium-3 bosenovas obviously should also be considered. I received no reply and CERN's paper doesn't address helium-3 bosenovas either. I also wrote about nuclear events in helium, certainly a potential danger in helium-3 and even possible plasma and fusion reactions of helium-3 at the LHC. Again no answer from CERN. Only this sweeping rebuttal: "There is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforseen catastrophic explosion" Is this science or speculation and politics? Don't worry from CERN, but this time not from the CERN PR department, but their CERN theory group.

If this sounds a spectacular failure in addressing safety issues honestly, well what other explanation is there? All they had to say was Helium-4 Bosenovas are Bunk, and Cold Fusion of Helium-4 Stinks. Of course we hope other physicists will examine CERN's 6 page paper and let everyone know if CERN's arguments are sound. Even if they are on Helium-4, one mosquito does not a summer make. Though there have been plenty of light speed protons in another CERN public relations context, masquerading as mosquitos.

If the politics of safety can override safety concerns, like chicks sprawled on red sports cars, are there other similar sales jobs on safety approximating the scientific? Where is the CERN Model hiding out? Look no further than the pharmacuetical industry. When people die, safe products are recalled. Tons of safety reports and tankers on a magazine sunset, and then a giant oil tanker spills and kills birds and animals and fish by the thousands. With 6 months of downtime at the LHC thanks to accidents can happen, they've got plenty of time for gearing up for a new sales campaign, CERN TV commmercials. We're still waiting breathlessly for "Spin the Collider and Win" or "My Best Friend is a Collider / When he gets warm I get hot / Gimme gimme gimme more / My collider / Bang, bang, bang / Big Bang. Be there! Beat Doomsday! Make it happen. Geneva is to die for. Hunker in our bunker or dance the night away. Win a trip for two at participating Dunkin Donuts, your Collider Central. Free Collider Keychain in every limited time only Giant Collider Donut. Careful when you munch. Be safe, dunk first."

Nowadays politics is part of big science. Recently a Climate scientist at MIT, Richard S Lindzen wrote a paper, "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" Although the author states that the focus of his paper is on climate science, "some of the problems pertain to science more generally."

Lindzen notes "the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs." The LHC Machine is certainly part of this change from earlier Einsteinian physics to let's see what happens when we simulate the Big Bang.

". . . an emphasis on large programs that never end." Fifty years of CERN and now on a budget of $1 billion a year with a $10 billion broken collider that might never work right.

". . . the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of 'carrots and sticks' where by reputations are made and broken." CERN in a nutshell.

". . . the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research." New Physics sought.

". . . scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of." Safety or the appearance of safety? Critics are doomsayers who just don't understand.

Well this still works for CERN because it is an enormous organization that has a small powerful directorate and a Director General with Presidential Powers, 'carrots and sticks'. So big and influential in physics that those within and those outside are wary of demurring on anything. Even 20 EU governments that support CERN financially applaud rather than criticize, but then they're not scientists, or cost accountants, and just as misinformed as anyone else. If there are any diplomatic groans, it's probably because the big collider party this October 21st has been called off. In the interests of vitual safety, no doubt here a Virual Inauguration would be safer for Heads of State. Cheaper too, a few souvinir hardhats FedEx'd. Click for Bollinger and caviar now.

No doubt CERN will spring for the real thing. These guys pay their bills. It's prestige that still counts. With participation in other nuclear labs in Europe and friendly relations with many others worldwide, CERN amounts to something like the Church of the Middle Ages. Not based in Geneva for nothing. In 1955 the Swiss Government gave CERN carte blanche to operate in Switzerland as part of the deal to locate its operations in Switzerland. The list of concessions and priviledges CERN enjoys gives it the power of a city state (currently 2,600 staff, plus some 7,931 scientists and engineers, in Wikipedia) or in modern terms, that accorded to a foreign government's embassy and its diplomats. When CERN expanded into France in 1973, the French government was more circumspect but awarded CERN similar if more limited powers. Neither country though has jurisdiction over CERN, its property, its personnel or its activities. Though the French have reserved some rights including the right to intervene if there is a threat to France. If CERN blows up Geneva, Switzerland will have to sue Fermilab. An obvious mistake to put an organization above the law, like we didn't know the gun was loaded. Anyone in Switzerland or CERN care to bet that the obvious mistakes are the most statistically significant?

Surely if there were doubts within CERN as to problems or even the advisability of the Large Hadron Collider in the first place, we would hear about it? Not much has slipped through the cracks in the CERN PR department except their tactics. One source is CERN archives. Some CERN people have found themselves embassassed in hindsight when their candid comments were recorded in CERN videos, transcripts and documents.

One insider has recently commented, not realizing there was some unwritten code of silence. A CERN physicist, Tommaso Dorigo who works at the LHC CMS experiment, wrote in his blog, A Quantum Diaries Survivor, "In fact CERN appears a bit up-tight about the latest events in sector 34 of the LHC tunnel. He goes on to say ". . . since my blog is targeted as a possible source of leaks. . . And if I play fair, maybe I am allowed to survive here, and maybe one day I will stop being threatened every other day, in the name of protecting internal information of the experiments I am a part of."

Dorigo concludes, "Of course, I still assert my complete disagreement at a way to conduct scientific experiments paid with your tax money which resembles the management of the Pentagon rather than an agorà of education, research and scientific communication."

--Alan Gillis


References

Fairbairn, Malcolm and McElrath, Bob. "There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system", September 23, 2008, arxiv,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.4004v1.pdf

KFC. "Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a "Bose supernova"?, September 29, 2008, the physics arxiv blog, http://arxivblog.com/?p=645

Gillis, Alan. "Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment At The LHC", July 12, 2008, The Science of Conundrums, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/07/superfluids-becs-and-bosenovas-ultimate.html

Gillis, Alan. "The Almost Thermonuclear LHC", March 17, 2008, The Science of Conundrums, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html

Lindzen, Richard S. "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?", September 27, 2008, arxiv, http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf

Dorigo, Tommaso. "An agorà of education and scientific communication", September 23, 2008, A Quantum Diaries Survivor, http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/an-agora-of-education-and-scientific-communication/

CERN / Switzerland. "Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the European Organization for Nuclear Research . . .", June 11, 1955, CERN Legal Services, http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000012.pdf

CERN / France. "Agreement between the Government of the French Republic and the European Organization for Nuclear Research . . .", August 30, 1973, CERN Legal Services, http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000010.pdf

LHC Quench Stops CERN: Re-start Delayed Again

After last Friday's massive quench at the LHC, CERN has announced that re-starting the collider will have to wait even beyond 2 months for repairs and downtime. With a planned winter shutdown in late November, even if the collider were ready, there would not be enough time to continue tests. Re-start of the LHC should be in April 2009.

Day 7 into the major accident damaging part of the LHC helium cooling and superconducting magnet systems, indicates little progress as yet. Scientists at CERN are still investigating the failure in Sector 3-4, an eighth of the 17 mile ring of magnets that are normally cooled to near absolute zero temperature. The extent of the damage is greater than was reported by CERN initially. Dismissive at first of the collider's "teething problems", CERN suggested that the LHC could be operational soon. A sketchy press release was followed by another sketchy press release.

Oddly after the BBC discovered the massive quench of about 100 magnets in a log entry on a CERN website, "the entry has since been removed" according to TimesOnline the day after.

It was also TimesOnline that said on September 21st that a connection between 2 giant magnets melted, with a release of one tonne of helium, adding the heat also melted 2 giant magnets, causing an explosive release of liquid helium which blasted helium gas through the ring tunnel. No one was hurt as no personnel were in the collider ring said CERN, normally only off limits when proton beams are operating. CERN said that at the time of the accident last Friday morning, there were no beams and only admitted to "a large helium leak" and "a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted".

The only piece of real news by CERN's chief spokesman, Dr James Gillies, who does the standard tour of the major media outlets to reassure journalists, outside of his department's press releases, was about the damaged magnets in question that he identified as giant quadrupoles, in the Telegram UK, September 20th. Later the probably melted connection turned out to be a busbar, a type of reinforced splice of magnet ribbon cable, one of many such connections between magnets.

It wasn't exactly a routine failure. Commissioning was still going on in Point 4 and on either side into the later damaged zone of Sector 3-4. and in 4-5. The high energy test was of the RF system for anticipated higher loads when it would be used to power up beams to 5 TeV, that were scheduled for later this year.

As of today only specialized safety teams and technicians have been allowed in to check for hazards and equipment damage. Following the accident Sector 3-4 showed some continuing warming of magnets and helium, some of the warmest then cooling, but now the Sector has been partially re-cooled. Most magnets are at 30 K, with no further helium leaks reported.

Eventually the damaged Sector 3-4 will be warmed to room temperature for repairs to be effected, but that would mean that remaining helium would have to be drained from the system first, and that hasn't started yet. Since temperatures have been brought down, it seems that the strategy is to cool the helium enough so that it can be safely drained as a liquid and stored as it's very expensive to replace. At least two damaged quadruoles will have to be cut out as they are welded together and then new ones welded in, a difficult and expensive proposition.

Coming on the heels of two other major failures, the hacking of part of the CMS computer system, during the big September 10th media launch, and the destruction of a 30 tonne surface transformer during a thunderstorm shortly afterwards, powering 2 sectors of the LHC cooling system, the need for a more careful re-launch of the collider is apparent to CERN, hence the further delay to spring.

CERN publicly has put on a brave if vague face, with its first very short press release of the 20th September, "Incident in LHC sector 3-4", though it was abundantly clear the day of the accident September 19th that it was more than an incident, as reported by the BBC that day. Even on the day of the accident, according to Scientific American, "CERN said on Friday that "The LHC is on course for [its] first collisions in a matter of weeks", just a day later it announced the minimum two-month repair job." Lately Dr Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN referred to the accident as "undoubtedly a psychological blow."

But there are other factors leading up to the accident that haven't been addressed. Certainly timing the First Beam to suit a media bash opening, when the CMS was being hacked, and still going ahead with it, suggests the need to perform for the media above ordinary safety considerations. Several other factors also indicate a rush to perform for the media and a huge worldwide audience.

Reuters reported September 10th, that there were "Small electrical issues before CERN machine start-up". "Project leader Lyn Evans gave no details . . ."

Operating the collider during a thunderstorm is certainly a known risk at the Tevatron, and 36 hours after the September 10th opening, a 30 tonne surface transformer that powers part of the helium cooling system failed during a lightening strike. Cause of failure still not confirmed by CERN.

According to the LHC Commissioning with Beam page, "The winter shut-down will then be used to commissioning and train the magnets up to full current, such that the 2009 run will start at the full 14 TeV design energy." Lyn Evans reiterated the same point in a talk on "The LHC Machine" at a CERN colloquium, Strings 2008, August 18th. Some installed magnets from another supplier had to be retrained. Earlier this year there were plans to jump to 7 TeV. Then 5 TeV was announced as rather a surprise, the new goal per beam. Where the damaged magnets from this lot of not fully trained magnets?

What if CERN has run out of luck? They have been lucky, not running beams they say during the transformer failure and the huge magnet quench, but what if they had been running beams? Beams could have been lost causing more damage. They ran beams during the hacking of CMS, but luckily there were no collisions.

There's a long road ahead. As Fermilab/SLAC's sponsored magazine, Symmetry wrapped up the transformer accident at the LHC, "These kinds of hiccoughs in starting up a large collider are not surprising as the LHC has millions of critical components."

What? Only millions?


References

Gillis, Alan. "Accident Cripples LHC", The Science of Conundrums", September 19, 2008, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/accident-cripples-lhc.html

Higgins, Alexander G. "Small accidents mean big trouble for supercollider", AP/PhysOrg, September 22, 2008, http://www.physorg.com/news141278719.html

CERN. "Incident in sector 3-4", Press Release, September 20th, 2008, http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR09.08E.html

CERN. "LHC re-start scheduled for 2009", Press Release, September 23, 2009, http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR10.08E.html

Reuters. "Hadron Collider halted for months", Reuters News Video, September 21, 2008, http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=91036

Chalmers, Matthew and Henderson, Mark. "CERN delays atom-smashing over magnet fault", TimesOnline, September 20, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4789673.ece

Leake, Jonathan. "Oh blast, that's the wrong kind of big bang", TimesOnline, September 21, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4794825.ece

Highfield, Roger. "Large Hadron Collider to be turned off for two months following damage", Telegraph UK, September 20, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/20/scilhc120.xml

Gillis, Alan. "LHC Not So Safe". The Science of Conundrums, September 12, 2008, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-not-so-safe.html

Gillis, Alan. "LHC Fails Thunderstorm Test", The Science of Conundrums, September 17, 2008, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-fails-thunderstorm-test.html

Lite, Jordan. "Hobbled LHC shuttered for repairs; 'No big deal say scientists'", SciAm, September 22, 2008, http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=hobbled-lhc-shuttered-for-repairs-n-2008-09-22

Reuters. "Small electrical issues before CERN machine start-up", Reuters News, September 10, 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLA57119

CERN. "LHC Commissioning with Beam", LHC Commissioning, page still current, http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/

Gillis, Alan. "LHC Start-up To Shutdown 2008", The Science of Conundrums, August 22, 2008, http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/08/lhc-start-up-to-shut-down-2008.html

CERN. "LHC: countdown to beam begins", CERN Courier, August 18, 2008, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/35431

Harris, David. "LHC glitch means two month delay" symmetrybreaking, September 20, 2008, http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/09/20/lhc-glitch-means-two-month-delay/

Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment At The LHC

The first BEC, a rubidium-87, at 3 temperatures, 400nK, 200nK and 50nK, each pile of atoms 1 mm wide, activity greater nearer absolute zero, NIST 1995

In a familiar world of solids, liquids and gases, we find the fourth state of matter, the plasmas of lightning to the aurora borealis and fluorescent tubes at the office. Further out, minor phenomena becomes the big event in space, our shining stars are plasma being fused producing light. Not until 1924 was a fifth state of matter considered possible. Intrigued by quantum statistics, invented by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose from observations of light, Einstein applied Bose’s work to matter. The Bose-Einstein Condensate(BEC) was born. Was there any truth to the theory, Einstein himself wondered, that matter that could condense at ultracold temperatures into something new?

Einstein’s theory was left hanging, as a mathematical artifact, until 1938. Fritz London, a German theoretical chemist and physicist, working on helium at the same time as the Russian Pyotr Kapitsa who discovered its superfluid state at just under 2.2 K, found it behaved like Einstein’s theoretical BEC. Subsequent research confirmed London’s insight. Both stable isotopes, ordinary helium-4, and the rare helium-3 at much lower temperatures, are quantum superfluids, behaving like matter-waves or superatoms, undifferentiated matter with vastly different properties from their gas state or their ordinary bottled fluid state. Now scientists had a way of studying laboratory tabletop quantum physics. These, the only two superfluids known with zero viscosity, have sparked intense interest, helium-4 a bosonic superfluid and helium-3, a fermionic superfluid. Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch. A gateway opened which eventually led to the laboratory production of other BECs when finally ultracold states could be induced, starting in 1995.

Viewing superfluid helium in action, demonstrates the baffling counter-intuitive nature of quantum fluids and other BECs. Some of the stunning properties of superfluid helium were observed if not understood back in 1908 when the Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, cooled helium-4 to -269 Celsius. Not only was there no resistance to flow, the superfluid could climb the walls of the vessel, like a film, always 30 nanometers thick, defying gravity, or pour through the smallest hole or fissure, or leak through some apparently non-porous matter.

Further studies showed that this superfluid, now called Helium II, behaved as a two-fluid model, partly in a low energy ground state, and partly in an excited state. With a little added heat and manipulation of the superfluid, an interaction of the two states was enhanced, producing a fountain effect, as though 2 fluids existed.

In our own Sun and countless other stars, hydrogen fusion produces helium, the second most abundant element, and is in turn eventually fused by steps into carbon-12. On Earth there isn’t much, a trace atmospheric gas but found in quantity up to 7 percent in some natural gas. It’s produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Given an electric charge, helium can fluoresce like neon. Even rarer molecules of helium-3 have been produced in helium-4 during ionization. Superfluid helium is also a superconductor, 30 times more efficient than copper as well as a thermal conductor 300 times that of copper. And both helium-3 and helium-4 have been cooled to near absolute zero, helium-4 retaining its superfluidity, helium-3 crystallizing, yet still capable of movement like other BECs. Adding enormous pressure of 25 atmospheres and more, forces even helium-4 to act like other BEC ‘solids’.

If superfluid helium can tell us a lot about other ultracold BECs now being studied and produced by over 200 research teams worldwide, then BECs that also appear to be superfluids and have two coexisting states like the two fluid state of superfluids, could show us how superfluids behave. It’s more than satisfying the curiosity of pure research. BECs have been turned into atom lasers and BECs have produced bosenovas, an inexplicable phenomenon where BECs explode, releasing more than the energy present in the system and where about half of the BEC sample literally vanishes without a trace. Fascinating and worrisome in any lab working with small amounts of BECs, but superfluid Helium II BEC is being used in great quantities as a coolant in certain nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.

The possibilities of a giant BEC bosenova produced in superfluid Helium II haven’t been investigated. The matter is urgent as 120 T of superfluid Helium II are being used at the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, whose energies far surpass any other collider’s, not only beam energies, but RF applied, extreme Tesla Fields by superconducting magnets, and electrical energies equivalent to the consumption of Geneva, powering the 27 km ring system. Startup of the LHC at 5 TeV per proton beam has been delayed to this September but for other technical reasons.

The problem too, is that BECs are new and strange. It wasn’t until 1995 that an ultracold BEC was produced by new methods of supercooling, in this case applied to a gas of Rubidium-87 to bring it near absolute zero. For physics it was a sudden explosion in the quantum world. A new field of study, Condensed Matter Physics, a new state of matter positively confirmed, but far from understood. Matter acting as one giant atom with the properties of a superfluid. Shared Nobel Prizes awarded in 2001went to the team leaders at JILA, the joint NIST project with CU-Boulder, Carl E. Weiman and Eric A. Cornell. A third share in the Nobel for a sodium-25 BEC developed independently went to Wolfgang Ketterle now at MIT. Research at MIT is on a massive scale with several big BEC labs, working in part on BEC atom lasers. Don’t worry, Ketterle has said, atom lasers only work in a vacuum and would only travel a meter without one. Nevertheless matter-wave lasers are bound to be improved. There’s always military interest and funding.

A bosenova explosion of rubidium-85, from a new burstmovie by NIST, 2008

What astonished some physicists was another BEC event in 2001, well beyond anything anticipated. The BEC discovery team at JILA produced a new rubidium-85 BEC. While an electromagnetic field was applied to cause a stronger attraction among the BEC atoms, the BEC started to shrink and then exploded like a supernova. The result was a release of particles in various streams, leaving behind a much smaller BEC remnant. The thermal energy released was greater than the energy in the BEC and about half of all the thousands of atoms of the rubidium-85 disappeared. The effect was at first nicknamed the bosenova, and still a total puzzle to this day. After 7 years of study, the latest research on whatever goes on in a bosenova, now referred to as a BEC loss, needs a “new microscopic BEC physics” to explain it, says N.R. Claussen et al of a joint BEC team at the U of Colorado at Boulder, in a paper published in February this year. A second team at UC-Boulder led by Elizabeth A. Donley published the following month, also could not account for the bosenova phenomenon nor the apparent loss of atoms.

Though the bosenova effect is staggering in its repercussions for the Standard Model, none of the more than 200 teams experimenting with BECs appear interested. The only study groups working seriously on bosenovas are those at JILA. Other research teams are looking for new BECs and a few are looking for applications of BECs to create things like better atomic clocks, interferometers or even studying light by teasing BECs with lasers to slow light down or stop it! In the future, quantum computing might use BECs and lasers. BECs could be big business.

What happens next at the LHC will be the next big experiment in a superfluid Helium II BEC. It’s not part of the design parameters, as physicists assume that the helium will be stable based on its use in the much smaller, much less powerful, up to 250 GeV per beam, RHIC collider in Long Island, NY. CERN’s interests lie in producing the Higgs boson at the LHC, perhaps micro black holes and quark-gluon plasma. Even in the much awaited CERN safety study released last month, there’s absolutely nothing on a possible bosenova implosion/explosion. Of course to test the safety of the enormous LHC to handle foreseen and unforeseen events you’d need another disposable one. But at least it is possible to subject Helium II to some of these high energies and hadron beams as a test. Not at the low energies of the RHIC, but at Fermilab’s Tevatron, currently the most energetic collider with 0.9 TeV per beam, though still far short of the power of the monster LHC at ordinary operating conditions of 7 TeV and ultimately 1,150 TeV collisions of lead ions at nearly twice light speed. Helium II could simply be used as a target by Tevatron beams to see what would happen, besides being exposed to high and fluctuating Tesla fields, ionized by electrical currents, subjected to some of the extreme conditions anticipated at the LHC.

The LSAG safety review at CERN, even their new report, is still a 4/5 majority internal assessment, and with an independent SPC Report/review of that review that’s still a CERN committee of 5 physicists, though the mainstream media is content with the CERN press releases, ‘No Danger That The LHC Will Destroy The Earth’, about everywhere. Though now black holes are now unlikely, but previously predicted to occur rapidly by CERN in the ‘LHC black hole factory’, but initially ignored, until a physicist wrote about the possibility in a letter to Scientific American that sparked the initial 2003 CERN safety assessment. There’s hard science and there’s French farce. Which one are we getting? Pushing the LHC big button as a test is a risky way to go. CERN has always insisted that small amounts of hadrons can’t do very much, but there’s an enormous amount of energy in the LHC and 120 T of BEC superfluid. There’s still a suit in the Hawaii courts to delay LHC startup because of safety concerns like black hole and strangelet production. Lately and since I first considered the possible dangers of superfluid helium in my article of March 7, 2008, ‘The Almost Thermonuclear LHC’, the plaintiffs, Dr Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho have announced they will seek an addendum to their suit to include bosenova risks at the LHC.

Seven years after the rubidium-85 BEC produced the first bosenova, we still don’t know what happened to half of the Rubidium-85 atoms that disappeared.

(This article originally appeared in the Alan Gillis Column, Big Science Gambles, published in ScientificBlogging.)


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Boyle, Alan. Doomsday Under Debate, Cosmic Log, MSNBC 2008
Braun-Munzinger, Peter, et al. SPC Report On LSAG Documents, CERN SPC 2008
Claussen, N.R. et al. Microscopic Dynamics in a Strongly Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensate, JILA 2008
Donley, Elizabeth A. et al. Dynamics of collapsing and exploding Bose-Einstein condensates, JILA 2008
Ellis, John, et al. Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions, CERN LSAG 2008
Gillis, Alan. The Almost Thermonuclear LHC, The Science of Conundrums, 2008
Ketterle, Wolfgang. Ch 9, Bose-Einstein Condensation: Identity Crisis for Indistinguishable Particles, in “Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads”, Springer Berlin, 2006
Schewe, Phil et al. Supersolid, Quantum Crystal, A Bose-Einstein Condensate in Solid, Physics News Update, The AIP Bulletin of Physics News, 2004

SuperfluidUploaded by reelgood0008 BBC Video

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.

You Appear To Be Running A Large LHC

Windows XP at CERN LHC CMS. It's little things like ...please send an error report, that could get us into a lot of trouble. The Compact Muon Solenoid weighs in at 5 jumbo jets with a magnetic field of 4 Teslas at 21,000 amps, the magnet supercooled to -269 degrees C. It's all boggling, the sheer scale and complexity, with 3 other major experiments, each in its own giant cavern and 2 piggyback ones in a monumental 27 km ring tunnel of cryogenics and superconducting magnets for the beam pipes.1700 major interconnections for 1232 dipoles in 15 meter lengths for curving the beams, 400 5-7 meter focusing quadrupoles, another 5,000 corrector magnets. Hundreds of thousands of bolts, 40,000 or 10 km worth of special welds using tungsten gas, 65,000 electrical splices of superconducting cables and a lot of duct tape. For this main ring alone the nominal current is 11,850 amps. Imagine plugging in the CMS toaster for a total draw of 32,850 amps. CERN should be able to do that without knocking out the European Power Grid. But the energy stored in the ring magnets once powered is 10 GJ with 725 MJ in the beam. A small loss is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet. If somebody turns on their air conditioner in Geneva, the beam could dump 157 kg of TNT equivalent, the ring another 2 metric tonnes.

After sifting through a mountain of info on CERN's friendly websites I'd say the risk of conventional accidents is the first thing to consider. This one failure in the power supply could bring down the entire LHC. Add the other 4 tonnes of TNT equivalent in the CMS. Explosions, electrical fires, rupture of the superfluid helium coolant under considerable pressure in the cryogenic pipe system running throughout the ring and CMS, pumps and compressors failing. The Large Hadron Collider could be a "ten billion dollars or whatever it is" disaster a nanosecond before someone clicks Send Error Report or Don't Send.