CONSPIRACY theorists would have a field day with this one: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle smasher being built at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, suffered a serious setback when a support structure for key magnets failed during routine tests on 27 March. The magnet assembly was made by Fermilab, CERN鈥檚 main rival in Batavia, Illinois.
The so-called inner triplet magnets are designed to squeeze the LHC鈥檚 counter-rotating proton beams and make them collide at four points along the 27-kilometre tunnel. The magnets are cooled using superfluid helium at 1.9 kelvin inside a vacuum, but a structure holding the magnets in place broke when asymmetric forces of the kind expected during the LHC鈥檚 operation were applied.
鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 strong enough,鈥� says Fermilab鈥檚 Peter Limon, who is now at CERN. He adds that 鈥減eople are disappointed, of course, but there are no recriminations鈥�.
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Limon is also concerned about a cryogenic box that feeds power and helium to the magnets, which was near the accident. 鈥淲e have yet to determine if it鈥檚 damaged,鈥� he says.
