How a Poor Soldering Job Brought Down the LHC

As I wrote previously, the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be out of action until spring because of a helium leak into the tunnel. While scientists are still not 100% sure what the problem was --- the tunnel still needs to be warmed from its normal supercool temperature so inspectors can analyze the section --- they have their suspicions.

CERN researchers have already determined that a connector between electromagnets failed and heated up, causing a shutdown. That caused a hole to be melted in the coolant tube, causing a leak that spilled a ton of liquid helium used to cool that section.

While the LHC has been test-fired, they haven't actually produced a collision yet. Scientists had hoped to bring the LHC up to high power and try some collisions before the winter "break," when the machine is shut down to conserve power.

It is now expected to be the end of May before that can occur.

According to Lyn Evans, project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the problem was likely a poor soldering job on one of the connectors. Ah, human error.

Perhaps that leads more credence to all the fear over the possibility that the LHC could cause miniature black holes or strangelets and thereby cause the end of the world. Nah. If so, we've got until the end of May, at least!