PARIS: Equipment critical to the world's greatest atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, has failed during a test, the European organisation for nuclear research CERN, said yesterday.
Three 13-metre-long magnets manufactured and installed by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the U.S. - which is in friendly competition with CERN to identify a key elementary particle - came apart when subjected to 20 times normal atmospheric pressure.
These magnets are used to focus particle beams prior to collision in the accelerator. The massive ring-shaped tunnel that forms the accelerator is 100 m deep and 27 km long, and is sited at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) job is to accelerate elementary particles called protons to near the speed of light and smash them into one another. When the protons crash together, they break apart into even smaller particles. This should allow physicists to study the basic nature of matter by replicating conditions that existed in the incredibly high-energy conditions in the fraction of a second immediately following the big bang.
The biggest quest is to identify the so-called Higgs boson, a suspected particle whose existence would explain perplexing questions about the nature of mass.
The incident on March 27 did not cause any casualties, both laboratories said. The collider is scheduled to go into operation in November 2007.
"At this time, the consequences - if there are any - on the calendar for the Large Hadron Collider are not known," Fermilab said in a statement, published on its own site and on CERN's. According to the Fermilab statement, the structure holding the trio of super-magnets in place failed. Fixing the problem "has the highest priority for Fermilab," it said, adding that "whatever is necessary to get things back on track" would be done.
Earlier tests, the U.S. lab acknowledged, had not subjected the magnets to "asymmetric loads" such as might occur during cool-down or refrigeration failure.
CERN has no suspicion that the failure was in any way deliberate on the part of Fermilab, a spokeswoman, Sophie Tesauri, said in response to a question. "Their scientific credibility would be compromised. It is in their interest that LHC function properly," she said.
It is hoped that the LHC will be able to crash protons together at seven times the energy achievable with Tevatron, the most powerful existing particle accelerator, found at Fermi's National Laboratory in Illinois.
