On Friday, CERN Director-General Robert Aymar gave a talk on CERN activities at the 84th Plenary Meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators. One major focus of the talk was of course the status of the LHC, and of particular interest are two pictures of the damage done to the accelerator during the incident on September 19. They are the first publicly-available pictures of the damage that I am aware of.
- Agenda of the Meeting (Aymar’s talk is item 5)
- Slides page for the talk (PDF and PPTX) [Accessible again, see updates]
- Direct link to PDF [Accessible again, see updates]
The pictures of the damage are on pages 17 and 18. Page 18 in particular illustrates that the consequences when one of LHC’s multi-ton magnets is shifted by a significant distance.
Many thanks to Director-General Aymar and to CERN for making these updates and pictures available to the public.
Update (5:10PM CET / 11:10AM EST): Access to the talk has been restricted over the past hour or so. I will send an inquiry to the CERN Press Office to ask about this change in access. In the meantime, the pictures from the talk may be seen here and here.
Update (December 4): The slides are publicly accessible again.
Update (December 5): I have received a reply to my inquiry from the Press Office: “Sorry for not replying to your mail about the LHC pictures sooner. I believe that the [Director General] was concerned that the CERN community should receive the news from him before it was made more widely available, that’s why the link to the talk was temporarily restricted. As you’ve noted, it’s now back up, as is a more comprehensive report on the status of the LHC: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR17.08E.html.”
[...] lunchtime conversations these days. I don’t really know much beyond the very basics, but a recent post at the US LHC Blog motivated me to put up a post in the hope of generating some [...]
the pictures don’t seem to be that public as one needs CERN credentials to view the slides…
Thanks for posting that. Very impressive the damage that can be done by expanding Helium.
I still want to see pictures of the “smokin’ hole” at the location of the initial arcing.
Hi aw,
I checked very carefully to make sure the slides were fully public at the time of my post — including access from outside CERN with no special credentials. You can see from my update that the access requirements for the slides have been changed since then. Sorry about the confusion!
Seth
seth, did you get any reply from the CERN press office about the change in access?
[...] is sad about this is I found this out from a news posting in DZERO, which was linking to a USLHC blog. Why did it come to me that way!? They can do a little [...]
Hope this whole ordeal is fixed as early as possible and we are back on track with the energetic colliding stuff. Good luck.
[...] after he posted the link to the slides, the access to the slides was restricted. So he contacted the CERN Press Office, why this was done. [...]
As mentioned in a previous post by Seth Zenz on December 5th, the Director General was concerned that the CERN community should receive the news from him before it was made more widely available. He then asked that access to the slides were temporarily restricted. Now all is available on-line. See CERN’s latest press release of December 5, complete with report and photos.
Thanks for posting Seth Zenz. I also want to see pictures of the “smokin’ hole
Hi Jessica. The third picture here shows the “smokin’ hole” being repaired: http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1027358 Not smoking so much after all, is it?