What Happened to the Large Hadron Collider? Its Current Status, Delays, and Problems CERN Faces

Finn Orfano
Categories : Space ,Science
Tags : Science space topics space technology

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What Happened to LHC?

Scientists and engineers alike at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, were greeted on September 19, 2008 with troubling news: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) encountered a failure known as a “quench,” which forced them to halt the massive physics experiment.

The problem, after a thorough investigation, has been linked to a leak in the machine’s liquid helium source, which is used to cool down LHC’s super-cooled, superconducting magnets. This led 100 of these magnets to overheat, not to mention the loss of the machine’s vacuum conditions.

For those not quite familiar with the experiment, LHC uses superconducting magnets to steer particle beams around its 27 kilometer-long tunnel. One of the project’s main goals is to recreate the scenario just moments after the Big Bang. Alongside that grand target, the LHC project also hopes to unravel the mysteries surrounding the yet-to-be observed Higgs boson particle and dark energy.

How Does This Affect LHC?

CERN reported on LHC’s success on September 10

This latest development is in stark contrast with the reports that came out in early September 2008, when the collider went online. On that day, CERN announced that they had successfully fired the first beams around the underground tunnel. The experiment’s most crucial step, however, wherein those beams collide head on, had not been achieved, due to the aforementioned incident. CERN, in a subsequent update, added that repairs will probably be finished and that LHC will go back online by early spring of 2009.

While this is certainly unwelcome news, not only for the people behind the project but also for the entire world, it is worth mentioning that this is not the first time the Large Hadron Collider has encountered problems. As a matter of fact, prior to the quench, CERN engineers had just recently replaced one of the machine’s defective transformers which slowed down the project’s early success.

What Now?

Even though the scientists and engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider are disappointed with the problems their project is currently facing, they are by no means disillusioned or downhearted. Even this early, there are plans to upgrade LHC. The proposal is projected to take place around 2012 and will effectively rename the machine to Super LHC.