3 Large Hadron Collider Headaches (So Far)—and How to Fix Them

• Large Hadron Collider
• research
• extreme machines
• physics
• CERN

Less than two weeks ago, the future looked rosy for the Large Hadron Collider. On Sept. 10, the world's largest particle accelerator launched, sending its first beams of protons whizzing around the 17-mile ring underneath the Swiss and French Alps. However, somewhere along the way to uncovering the Higgs boson "God particle" and quieting doomsday naysayers, a trio of setbacks put the LHC out of commission for two months. Here's what's gone wrong so far, and what the CERN team plans to do about it.

1. Hackers

"It was never going to be as easy as flipping a switch," CERN spokesman James Gillies told Popular Mechanics this morning. But the bad times at the world's biggest science experiment began with more of an embarrassment than a disaster. Shortly after the official launch day, hackers calling themselves the Greek Security Team broke into a computer system connected with the Compact Muon Solenoid particle detector, or CMS, one of the four data-collecting stations around the machine.

But Gillies said that the hacked computer was programmed solely to inform the public of how the experiment worked, and that the section accessed by the Greek Security Team was separated from the LHC controls by firewall, so the scientists could cut off the attack. "It was nowhere near to the sensitive areas," Gillies assured PM.

The hackers did manage to bring down the CMS Web site, telling LHC operators that they were "pulling your pants down." Thankfully, however, they seemed more interested in getting attention and taunting the LHC's security personnel than actually causing harm, Gillies said. So if the attack did show weakness in the LHC network, security officials should have time to shore it up before anyone can do real damage to the system.

2. Transformer Failure

On Thursday, CERN retroactively announced that the collider had suffered a transformer failure a week earlier—just one day after its activation. The transformer broke down when scientists tested the beam of protons that would careen counterclockwise around the ring (this beam is set eventually to crash into its counterpart, the clockwise beam).

The transformer failure wasn't a catastrophe, though. "That's the kind of thing you have a kit of spare parts for," Gillies said. With a replacement installed and cooled down to the LHC's ultralow temperature, the physicists looked like they were finally ready to start smashing.

3. Wiring Short and Helium Leak

The first two LHC abnormalities may have been under control, but this weekend, the machine's wiring went kaput.

Gillies told PM that all of the LHC's 15-meter-long magnets—there are about 1600 of them overall—must be wired together. And during final testing this weekend, just one of those many connections shorted out, the scientists believe. They had spent the summer cooling the magnets to an absurdly low temperature—near 2 Kelvin (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit)—so that materials would become superconductive, meaning they would encounter no electric resistance. The short, however, caused a leak of liquid helium, which is used as a coolant—a ton of it seeped into the tunnel, resulting in a call to the fire brigade.

Now that one of the connections has failed, LHC operators must warm up that section enough that people can enter it and install new parts, find the exact location of the problem, make the repair and cool the materials all the way down again. If the LHC's experiments didn't require superconductivity, the repairs might take only a few days. But warming up and then cooling down such huge magnets to extreme temperatures is time-consuming, Gillies said, so the collider will be down for a minimum of two months. And because CERN already had planned to give the LHC a break this winter to save on its astronomical electric bill, all these problems could push the first legitimate particle collisions back to 2009.

Delays are frustrating, especially with the LHC liable to lose much of the attention that it garnered for launch day. But despite their excitement to finally fire up the extreme machine, Gillies said, scientists knew that some kind of minor calamity could be in the cards. With so many parts spread over such a huge space, it actually might have been more surprising if nothing had gone wrong, he added. And with 15 to 20 years of construction behind them and the same amount of research time yet to come, Gillies insisted, the physicists at CERN—and those around the world keenly interested in the LHC's findings—have learned to be patient.

"We invited the world to watch," he said. And while the world got to enjoy the highs with the scientists, including watching them pop the bubbly when the machine went live for the first time, now the LHC's lows are on full display as well.

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