As science and technology projects go, they don’t get much bigger than this. The large hadron collider (LHC) which, with great hullabooloo was finally completed this September at the CERN site in Switzerland, only to break down a couple of weeks later, is a project which can only be described in superlatives. Costing nearly e 8 billion and the result of nearly ten years’ work of a huge multinational team of scientists, engineers, software specialists and atomic physicists, the LHC is basically designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to such high speeds and energies that when they collide they are smashed into fragments representing the most basic forms of matter. Out of such basic sub atomic particle fragments nothing less than the entire universe is created. In particular, the conditions created by the atom smasher are such that they should allow the detection of the as-yet undiscovered sub atomic particle, namely the Higgs boson. This is the almost mystical particle whose existence has been predicted from the application of the laws of quantum physics and is necessary to make the whole edifice of sub-atomic particles “gel” together. The discovery of the Higgs boson will therefore provoke a huge, Nobel Prize-winning “oof” of relief from physicists as their theories of atomic structure are proven correct. On the other hand, failure to discover the “Higgs” will certainly be
anti-climactic since it won’t be known whether the failure to detect the particle is due to the fact that it just doesn’t exist (in which case it’s back to the drawing board as far as atomic structure theories are concerned) or simply that the power or design of the hugely expensive LHC was not sufficient to detect it.
As befits such lofty objectives (some of the accompanying hyperbole included “discovering the secret of the universe” and “the beginning of a golden age of particle physics”) the LHC was opened, on the 10th September, amid much ceremonial formality.
This makes it all the more embarrassing that, barely six weeks later, the whole instrument had to be shut down because of a mechanical failure. A short circuit developed in one of the electrical supply systems feeding the hugely powerful superconducting magnets which, to handle the massive current flows, must be cooled to a temperature just above 2 – 3 °K, which is achieved using liquid helium coolant. The electrical short caused a leakage of the liquid helium, irreparably damaging at least five quadrupole magnets and 24 dipole magnets. Even worse, more magnets may have to be removed from the tunnel for cleaning and exchange of multilayer insulation. The damage is not minor; it is calculated that it will not be possible to get the machine up and running again before spring of next year.
Inevitably, a plethora of investigative committees have been set up to address the question of what caused the failure. However perhaps the most difficult question for the scientists to answer is the classic and much more fundamental one of how to justify such an expensive machine whose practical objectives cannot be fully understood by people without a higher degree in physics. Even before the credit crunch, this was a difficult task. Now, with the double whammy of the ignominious failure of the machine itself and an economic melt-down affecting almost the whole western world, this question is becoming (almost) more important than proving the existence of the Higgs boson.
