Editor’s note: It states in this article that Austria will withdraw from CERN because of budgetary pressures. This came from Austria’s Minister of Science and Research Johannes Hahn, but the exit was overruled shortly after by Chancellor Werner Faymann. So Austria remains involved with the LHC project.
We are grateful to Professor Fabjan, Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and other enthusiastic readers for pointing this out.
The measurements associated with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are not astronomical but they may give insights into far-away stars and dark materials.
This particle accelerator, crossing under the borders of France and Switzerland, has numbers to stretch the minds of the world’s population and the budgets of participating countries.
Twenty million euros is the yearly membership fee for The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) which is responsible for this atom-smasher.
That’s almost three quarters of the money Austria has for all European and international scientific institutes and projects. So, the country strongly associated with Max Planck, the theorist whose calculations helped mark the area of reality being tested by the LHC, is pulling out.
Vienna physicist Walter Thirring, who headed CERN’s theory group from 1968 to 1971, warned that other states could follow Austria. However, his country’s Science Minister, Johannes Hahn, described Austria’s withdrawal as a “pause”, pointing out that 30 or so states were already working with the Geneva-based centre without being members.
He said that while work like the LHC was high-profile, Austria’s role in it was small and the science ministry wanted “to enhance Austria’s research profile”.
The new machine would fetch €3 billion if there were a first- or second-hand market.
€20 million is a figure given for the repair to the machine after an electrical fault caused helium (supercooled to minus 271degrees centigrade) to vaporize and damage two magnets.
The alignment of the magnets in the LHC is critical. The particles speed up in straight line bursts and then bend into the next straight all the way around a 24 kilometer (17 mile) circle. If one of the 1,232 magnets is out a bit, the tiny slip of speeding matter gets knocked out too.
Much of this repair money goes towards an early-warning system to detect nano-ohm rises in resistance in the superconducting wires that power the bending magnets and additional pressure relief valves to reduce the damage of a similar incident.
On the anniversary of the accident, which happened nine days after the official start on 10th September 2008, the LHC is warming up again. In three or four weeks the first (deliberate) particle crash should occur.
The machine will run through winter with a short break around Christmas, which CERN’s director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci, says is “to allow people not to get divorced!” Over the cold spell, the LHC’s electricity bill will go up by around €8 million which is 40% of its annual cost.
In late 2010 the LHC’s four giant experiments may recoup huge amounts of scientific kudos when acres and bites of data may show evidence of new matter.
However, Austria, which has been part of CERN since 1959, should have officially ended its membership by then.
This particle accelerator, crossing under the borders of France and Switzerland, has numbers to stretch the minds of the world’s population and the budgets of participating countries.
Twenty million euros is the yearly membership fee for The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) which is responsible for this atom-smasher.
That’s almost three quarters of the money Austria has for all European and international scientific institutes and projects. So, the country strongly associated with Max Planck, the theorist whose calculations helped mark the area of reality being tested by the LHC, is pulling out.
Vienna physicist Walter Thirring, who headed CERN’s theory group from 1968 to 1971, warned that other states could follow Austria. However, his country’s Science Minister, Johannes Hahn, described Austria’s withdrawal as a “pause”, pointing out that 30 or so states were already working with the Geneva-based centre without being members.
He said that while work like the LHC was high-profile, Austria’s role in it was small and the science ministry wanted “to enhance Austria’s research profile”.
The new machine would fetch €3 billion if there were a first- or second-hand market.
€20 million is a figure given for the repair to the machine after an electrical fault caused helium (supercooled to minus 271degrees centigrade) to vaporize and damage two magnets.
The alignment of the magnets in the LHC is critical. The particles speed up in straight line bursts and then bend into the next straight all the way around a 24 kilometer (17 mile) circle. If one of the 1,232 magnets is out a bit, the tiny slip of speeding matter gets knocked out too.
Much of this repair money goes towards an early-warning system to detect nano-ohm rises in resistance in the superconducting wires that power the bending magnets and additional pressure relief valves to reduce the damage of a similar incident.
On the anniversary of the accident, which happened nine days after the official start on 10th September 2008, the LHC is warming up again. In three or four weeks the first (deliberate) particle crash should occur.
The machine will run through winter with a short break around Christmas, which CERN’s director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci, says is “to allow people not to get divorced!” Over the cold spell, the LHC’s electricity bill will go up by around €8 million which is 40% of its annual cost.
In late 2010 the LHC’s four giant experiments may recoup huge amounts of scientific kudos when acres and bites of data may show evidence of new matter.
However, Austria, which has been part of CERN since 1959, should have officially ended its membership by then.
