William Atkins
Thursday, 18 September 2008 23:04
Science -
Energy
Page 2 of 3
According to the CERN news release (“
LHC progress report, week 1”),
“To get beams around the ring in both directions on the first day exceeded all expectations, and the success continued through the night, with several hundred orbits being achieved.”
The news release states,
“The next step is to repeat the process for beam one, and that is set to begin this week.” They are commenting on the process to circulate Beam 1, like Beam 2 was circulated on September 10th, when Beam 2 was
“… captured and circulated for over half an hour before being safely extracted from the LHC.”
However, The LHC had a few problems over days following Sepember 10, 2008.
A failure occurred with a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC. The problem caused the main compressors to the cryogenics to turn off for two sectors of the LHC.
The next few days meant that recovery efforts from this failure were necessary.
The cryogenics system was placed in “standby mode” within the two affected sectors, with their temperatures kept at about 4.5 Kelvin.
During this time, the 30 metric ton power transformer, which failed, was replaced. At this same time, the cryogenics team went about the task of re-cooling the magnets.
The next commissioning stage for the LHC is to perform
“single turn studies using beam one, followed by RF capture and circulating beam in both rings.”
The RF system mentioned in the previous paragraph is described on page three.
