Michael Banks: December 2008 Archives

By Michael Banks

Whilst trawling the web this morning I came across a few blog posts showing the first pictures of the damage caused by the magnet failure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on 19 September.

The pictures were apparently shown during a presentation by the lab’s director general Robert Aymar on Friday at a meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators held at CERN.

The US/LHC blog posted a link to slides of Aymar’s talk. However, within an hour of the post (on 1 December) access to the talk had been restricted. Fortunately, particle physicist Stephanie Majewski from Brookhaven National Laboratory, who is at CERN for a year, posted the pictures from the talk on her blog.

From the two images, probably the more striking picture is the one that shows the region between the magnets that was crunched due to the pressure as the helium escaped into the tunnel. The other image shows a magnet unattached from its mount, which is secured to the concrete floor in the tunnel.

CERN is planning to release a full report in early December about the damage to the LHC, outlining the repair schedule and plans for operation in 2009.