Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

LHC suffers power failure, manages to keep its cool

One of the power supplies feeding the LHC failed early this morning (local …

It's not easy running a one-of-a-kind piece of equipment that has already accelerated particles to energies never before achieved. If there's not some over-ambitious bird dropping a baguette into the wiring, there's always the chance for a good, old-fashioned hardware failure. That seems to have been the case early this morning, Geneva time, when one of the high-powered lines feeding parts of the LHC failed. Fortunately, the liquid helium coolant was unaffected, so operations should pick back up quickly.

Word of the latest problems is just filtering out now; the first acknowledgment I've seen from anyone involved in the project came via the US-based LHC community's Twitter feed. In a tweet from roughly 3pm US Eastern time, the US LHC group acknowledged the failure, said that power had already been restored, and confirmed that the cryogenic system hasn't been affected.

But the failure was first recognized in near real-time, via a process that reveals just how much the public has taken a fancy to a 27km tunnel. It turns out that there's a private fan site for following the LHC's progress called the LHC portal. The members of its forum apparently tracked the power cut as various parts of the CERN website disappeared off the Internet, and gradually pieced together the scope of the power cut, eventually finding a PowerPoint with the images of the failed equipment shown here.

In any case, backup power seems to have kicked in reasonably quickly, and the operating temperature doesn't seem to have registered the failure. It's not possible to keep proton beams circulating under those conditions, and the power cut took out a smaller linear accelerator used to bring particles up to speed prior to injection into the main loop. However, given that the operators were able to get protons up to record energies in a fairly short time, this doesn't appear to be much more than a small speed bump.

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