Large Hadron Collider broken by bread dropped by passing bird

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/large-hadron-collider/6514155/Large-Hadron-Collider-broken-by-bread-dropped-by-passing-bird.html

 

Large Hadron Collider broken by bread dropped by passing bird

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.

 

 

 

 

By Tom ChiversPublished: 12:23PM GMT 06 Nov 2009

 

The Large Hadron Collider (left) and its arch-nemesis (right) Photo: AFP/GETTY/JOHN TAYLOR

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 baguetteâ€, 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.

 

 

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A failure like this, known as a “quenchâ€, 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.

It was this vast energy getting out of control that smashed the machine last time, causing a huge spillage of liquid helium and throwing two 10-ton magnets off their mountings. The succession of technical problems the LHC has suffered has led some physicists, apparently in all seriousness, to claim that it is being sabotaged by time-travelling particles from its own future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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