Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: LARGE HADRON COLLIDER FORCED TO HALT

by Hazed

After the hoopla and whoop-te-doo over the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN (even though ramping it up to perform its experiments is going to be a slow thing that takes several months), it was disappointing to read this week that the machine had to be switched off again due to a helium leak.

The fire brigade was called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel. The cause was due to something called a quench, which made around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets heat up by as much as 100 degrees centigrade. Not good - the magnets need to be supercooled to 1.9 kelvin above absolute zero in order to steer the particle beams around the circuits.

A spokesperson said that while the failure was "not good news", glitches of this kind were not unexpected during testing. The quench happened during the final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned. It will now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week - engineers will investigate the severity of the fault this weekend.

Let's hope they get things going again soon, so we can finally find out if the world is going to end!

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