The Large Hadron Collider’s woes have taken a faintly comic turn after the huge particle accelerator got broken by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.
The 27-kilometer (16.8 mile) LHC suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring.
Dr Mike Lamont, the LHC’s Machine Coordinator, said that a “a bit of baguette”, believed to have been dropped by a bird, caused the superconducting magnets to heat up from 1.9 Kelvin (-271.1C) to around 8 Kelvin (-265C), near the mark where they stop superconducting.
A failure like this, known as a “quench”, can be expected at around 9.6 Kelvin, CERN engineer Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka told The Register.
In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this could cause a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. However, the machine has several fail-safes which would have shut it down before the temperature rose too high.
This would have forced it out of action for a few days, but nothing like the year-long breakdown last year’s quench caused.
As it is, the LHC was only undergoing test firing. Full particle-smashing duties are scheduled to restart this month.
When fully powered up, the LHC’s two beams of protons and lead ions hurtling around the huge circle at a fraction of a percent below light speed each contain the energy of a Eurostar train travelling at full speed, according to the Cern site. Read more…
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