Engineering sector news

LHC gets warning system upgrade

1/10/2009
Engineers are hoping that an early warning system being installed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva could prevent incidents like the one on 19 September last year. The collider has been shut down since a magnet problem called a 'quench' caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the LHC tunnel.

The LHC is built inside a 27km-long circular tunnel which straddles the French-Swiss border. Eventually it will send two beams of particles crashing into each other at close to the speed of light. Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, which will reveal fundamental new insights into the birth of the universe.

An investigation for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), confirmed that the cause of last September's accident was an electrical fault in one of the splices that link two of the 1,200 'superconducting' magnets that accelerate particles around the LHC. Cern has spent approximately 40 million Swiss Francs (£24 million) on repairs to the LHC. Engineers have been making major upgrades and installing hundreds of new detectors around the machine.

A low-intensity proton beam could be injected into the LHC in the second half of October, officials have said. This beam test would involve only parts of the collider, rather than the whole 'ring'. If all goes to plan, the first beam collisions could occur before the end of the year.