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Atom-smasher relaunch delayed to November: official
Paris (AFP) Aug 4, 2009 The world's biggest atom-smasher, idle since breaking down only days after its launch last September, will likely restart in November, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said Tuesday. When the collider will be switched on, and at what power level, will be decided at a meeting of CERN scientists and officials later this week, said James Gilles, head of communications. "We are not going to announce a precise date but we are looking at the middle of November," he said. Nestled inside a 27-kilometre (17-mile) underground tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) promises to unlock deep mysteries about the Universe and the fundamental nature of matter. But the machine has been plagued with electrical glitches and faulty magnets designed to drive high-energy particles at close to the speed of light, leading to a series of delays. "All the damage to the 53 magnets has been repaired. We have been installing systems to make sure that if another one of these electrical splices fails, we don't have damage," Gilles told AFP by phone. The meeting later this week will also decide how high scientists intend to crank up the energy output of the collider. "We will certainly be above one teraelectronvolt" -- the maximum output of what remains the largest functioning collider in the world, the Tevatron at the national Fermilab near Chicago -- by the end of the year, he said. Before the maiden launch last Fall, the LHC's component parts had been tested to an energy equivalent of 5 teraelectronvolts, but it may be several years before the machine is able to operate at such high levels. Designed to shed light on the origins of the universe, the LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and cost six billion Swiss francs (3.9 billion euros, 4.9 billion dollars) to build. After more than a decade of painstaking work, the first proton beams were fired down the new accelerator in a blaze of publicity on September 10, 2008, only to break down nine days later due to a helium leak in its cooling system. Share This Article With Planet Earth
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World Forum: Cut CO2 80% by 2020, not 2050Washington DC (UPI) Aug 03, 2009 Greenhouse gases must be cut 80 percent by 2020, not by 2050 as U.N. countries propose, to preserve life as we know it, the head of a global conference said. "If we don't completely rethink and radically accelerate the plans to reverse global warming, we will, in all likelihood, create catastrophic climate change in our lifetime," State of the World Forum President Jim Garrison said Mon ... read more |
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