Tuesday 25 November 2008

LHC'09

Several interesting facts concerning the LHC are available on the slides from a recent talk of Jörg Wenninger. The talk describes in some detail the events between the glorious first beam on September 10 and the fatal accident on September 19. It explains what caused the accident, describes the steps already made to avoid similar problems in the future, and presents options for the repair schedule.

For those less interested in technical details, this page is the most relevant one:

In short, the operation will be restarted in late summer 2009 if they decide not to implement the full safety upgrade program. In that case, probably, both the energy and the luminosity will be smaller than previously assumed. On the other hand, if they decide for a full upgrade of the pressure relief system (which implies heating up all sectors) there will probably be no beam in 2009.

3 comments:

AmiyaMax said...

Sad news for particle physicists and string theorists alike. Higgs boson is under probe there. Will you be searching for gravity waves too?

Ptrslv72 said...

Hi Jester,
the slide 46 in Wenninger's talk seems to have been changed in the meantime. Now the title is "Plans for 2009... or what is being discussed inside the accelerator sector..." and a comment "Most likely!" appears on the right of Plan A (i.e. restart in late summer 2009). Perhaps someone high up complained that the talk was spreading a too bleak outlook...

Jester said...

People say that Rolf Heuer - the new DG - is in favor of plan B, so that, actually, plan B is "most likely" at the moment.

We will find something to kill the time, though not necessarily gravity waves ;-)