Incidents in LHC ...forcing restart in 2009

Sorry for being late to update you about the incidents which occured within a week of the LHC's inauguration. As the superconducting magnet lost about a tonne of liquid helium into the tunnel. As a result massive Quenches occurred around sector 3- 4 . it happened when one of the superconducting magnet which was kept cooled down by liquid helium- leaked. This causeed rise of the temperature. It was bad because it may result an abrupt change of proton beam's paths..the amount of lost superfluid helium is said to be about 1% of the total amount used in LHC.. After this incident on 19th September, the LHC was forced to shut down.


Investigation showed lately that a faulty electrical connection between 2 magnets was the cause of this. And for which the connection melted as of high current...“This incident was unforeseen,” said CERN Director GeneralRobert Aymar, “but I am now confident that we can make the necessary repairs, ensure that a similar incident can not happen in the future and move forward to achieving our research objectives.”..

This is a major disappointment for the LHC after a trail of events of opening on just a few days back, and this forced to reschedule the operation. It is now expected to restart in early spring in 2009.

“Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. “Nevertheless, the success of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex. I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigour and application.”

This LHC is very complexly designed and very unique. it is necessary to fully understand why and how the incident happened and making sure of it will never happen again.. this is why the restart may be delayed.

“The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas,” said Peter Limon, who worked on commissioning the world’s first large-scale superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in the USA. “Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases.”

Finally, We are pleased to know that its not that a major incident and might not take too long to reopen... the billion dollar project may show us new edge of human knowledge. proving the predicted theories and looking for the evidences to study..