In a message dated 12/1/2010 11:19:36 AM Eastern Standard Time,
caviness@southern.edu writes:
Bob,
Where do your figures & dates come from? The magnetic quench accident is
pretty old news (<2 yrs ago), and it is my impression that the damage
repair and refurbishment has already occurred, and that the LHC has been up and
running for the past year, almost immediately breaking the previous record
for high energy collisions, and ramping up to 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) last
March. The news bulletins on http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ sound like
they're having fun doing new physics, in never-before studied conditions.
Pretty upbeat, I'd say.
All the best,
Ken Caviness
Ken my source is Ian Sample's book "Massive, The Missing Particle That
Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science" Page 212,213.
Begin Quote.
"The CERN management decided it was two risky to run the machine at full
power, so for two years it will operate at only half of its capability,
meaning that the each of the accelerator beams will be whipped up an energy of
3.5Tev before they are steered into collisions in the detectors. Near the
end of 2011, the collider will close for twelve to eight months to give
engineers time to do repairs and install a safety system. The safety measures
will protect the machine from damage should things go awry at higher energies
and only once this work has been done will the LHC run at full power."
"The decision to operate the LHC at half its design energy was not made
easily, but CERN could not afford another crippling accident like the one
that shut down the machine for a year in 2008. No collisions means no data,
which is frustrating for physics and devastating for up-and coming students
trying to earn their Ph.D.s. But the decision has consequences. Many
physicists concede that that the machine may not make a concrete Higgs discovery
before 2015."