If the Large Hadron Collider wasn't having enough problems already, a bird dropping a bread crumb onto one of the LHC's cooling units last week caused a short circuit forcing the LHC to shut down. The 27 km particle accelerator built by CERN has already been offline for over a year due to a electrical short in a bus unit pair of cryogenically cooled magnets that eventually caused damage to some 53 of the superconducting magnets. That damage took CERN nearly two months to repair, then CERN, under pressure from many of its own physicists, decided to replace all of the bus connections between the magnets that could cause a similar electrical arc.
The offending bread crumb was found on a busbar in the cooling unit which caused the cryogenically cooled magnets in the sector to rise in temperature slightly which caused the LHC to automatically shutdown. The disruption was shortterm lasting only a few days and will not affect the full scale test operations later this month. As the collider is protected by high security fences, CERN officials believe a bird is the culprit for the bread crumb. To the left is a photo of the LHC detector. Toward the bottom of the picture is a person standing in front of the detector to give you idea of the size of the detector.
When the LHC does become fully operational, physicists hope to discover the elusive truths behind the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The LHC should create a Higgs boson every couple of hours if the Standard Model is correct. Three years of continuous operations of the collider will be needed in order to collect enough data to verify the existence of the Higgs boson.
Below is a popular rap video from a CERN physicist and researcher. :)
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