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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Hi all.
Seems that there may be more sinister forces at work, as the failure seems to have been in one of the supposedly-bulletproof "busbars" or superconducting interconnects, which effectively shut down an entire sector and caused a massive helium leak by breaking through the containment for the LHe pipework.
I have read an article which describes someone sabotaging the LEP2 during an upgrade by putting a beer bottle in one of the pipes; this was discovered late on in commissioning and resulted in a high level investigation which showed up no leads.
Its just possible that the damage was intentional. Possible reasons include a rival team trying to beat CERN to the post by accumulating more substantial data on the Higgs's mass (unlikely but possible).... to a disgruntled soon-to-be ex employee at CERN doing a little hacksaw work in the lab one evening. Either way they knew exactly what to break, to cause the maximum damage and LHC downtime.
The really unusual thing is that not one single quench ever did this much damage before, the equipment designed to protect against this should have prevented the level of damage seen. Then there's the whole "unbalanced forces in the triplet magnets resulting in catastrophic failure and repair" problem which should have been picked up on by someone.
We'll find out in a couple of weeks what went wrong, but my money's on some sort of manufacturing anomaly in the NbTi alloy blocks, bet they'll find another unseen problem in others.
Registered Member #1497
Joined: Thu May 22 2008, 05:24AM
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 801
Another possibility is that it could be activists/ignorant scared masses trying to stall the usage of the LHC due to the supposed black hole spawning/strangelet nature that was beaten to death by the media, publicized, and discussed to death.
At my university we have 3 NMR machines, I don't believe we've ever had a quench before, however while a quench *can* happen and *can* cause damage, to see a brand new set of superconducting magnets quench that badly to the point of 'catastrophic failure' seems a little horrid to me....
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
"Also, while records of joining operations are available, subsequent minor interventions and repairs were not, but should have been systematically monitored."
Hmm. Sounds like a "minor" repair damaged one of the splices and it wasn't recorded. This was from a PDF downloaded from Google.
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Was the LHC intentionally sabotaged?
