Came across the following article in The Straits Times yesterday, and found it relevant to my current work:
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New York: After 15 years and US$9 billion, the biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.
Many of the magnets meant to whizz high energy subatomic particles around a 27.4 km underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European Project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.
Despite a showy "switch-on" ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has yet to collide any particles.
This week, scientists and engineers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.
But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider's main goals, like identifying the dark matter that astronomers say makes up 25 per cent of the cosmos.
The energy shortfall could also limit the collider's ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterise life.
"The fact is, it's likely to take a while to get the results we really want," said Harvard physicist Lisa Randall.
The collider was built to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and smash them together in search of particles and forces that reigned earlier than the first trillionth of a second of time, but the machine could run as low as four trillion electron volts for its first year. Upgrades would come a year or two later.
Physicists in both sides of the Atlantic say they are confident that the European machine will produce groundbreaking science - eventually - and quickly catch up with an American rival, even at lower energy.
All big accelerators have gone through painful beginnings. "These are baby problems," said Dr Peter Limon, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, who helped build the collider.
But some physicists admit to being impatient. "I've waited 15 years," said Dr Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
"I want it to get up running. We can't tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now."
The delays are hardest on younger scientists, who may need data to complete a thesis or work towards tenure.
Colliders get their oomph from Albert Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy, both expressed in the currency of electron volts.
The CERN collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and distances where the current reigning theory, known as the Standard Model, breaks down and gives nonsense answers.
It got the nod in 1994 after the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been 87 km around and with an energy of 20 trillion electron volts, was cancelled by Congress.
However, retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy.
Dr Steve Meyers, head of CERN's accelerator division, said he thought the splices as they are could handle four trillion electron volts.
Dr Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University physicist who works at CERN, said she would happily take that energy level.
"The public pays for this," she said in an e-mail message, "and we need to start delivering".
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Fell asleep while typing the post, and just finished it this morning.
