The Compact Muon Solenoid

NewsHammer Exclusive Not just any magnet, but the biggest solenoid ever built, with about as much steel as the Eiffel Tower. A machine within a machine, 1 of 4 giant experiments within the immense LHC collider complex. The Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS is also like the other experiments, a reactor and a complex of detectors. The M in CMS refers to 3 Muon detector systems, but it has others as well designed to track the particle zoo release from collisions.

Each experiment has its particular focus, but essentially they work the same way. When particle beams are accelerated around the LHC ring to near light speed, the two beams traveling in opposite directions are squeezed together and forced to collide in each detector. In the CMS it's done by a extreme 3.8 Tesla magnetic field. Whatever event is produced is not only monitored and analyzed, but the collision products are contained within the magnetic bottle. So far at low energies up to 2.36 TeV last December in the CMS, there was the usual shower of new particles and some unexpected extras.

Shiny New CMS Goes For A Test Drive

The collider buzz wasn't about results. CERN was all excited about the spectacular performance of what could have been a giant red Ferrari parked outside the Globe. It got its own CERN paper written by pages and pages of physicists who work on CMS, and wow were they ever excited. They were so excited by the fabulous specs, the sheer power of the CMS million liter 2.36 TeV with 10,000 valves, the amazing bells and whistles on the biggest dashboard you ever saw, the va-va-va-vrooom as it turned all the corners impeccably, they forgot to analyze the data.

They got some down on a million souvenir DVDs for later but some obvious extra mesons couldn't be ignored blasting out of the extreme exhaust. No sweat, just a bit of smoke. Only 10% to 14% more charged hadrons than expected. Specifically more Kaons and Pions, these quark re-arangements of basic quarks and antiquarks that should more or less decay into muons.

Since 2.36 TeV was in Terra Incognita, it might be just one of those things. Not exactly a problem when the two predictive models based on lower power collisions didn't exactly agree either, or not a problem anyway, just more mesons rising a bit steeply at new higher energies and maybe a trend at still higher energies where they could well be a problem when the LHC collides heavy lead ions maybe this Fall. Paraphrased directly from the BBC report.

Never mind, the big question is why? Why more mesons? Are these new new mesons produced from fusion energy? From smashing protons into quarks that recombined? Or is something else going on? Come on BBC. Ask the right questions. I know, they're usually better with farm animals and foreign potentates.

But is CERN any better with protons? We think we understand why physicists were too excited to analyze the CMS data scientifically. Often there's so much data you have to toss out most of it to make any sense of what is left. There are various sophisticated computer programs for that developed out of the bad old days of nuclear physics when physicists were designing A-Bombs at Los Alamos. Code name: Monte Carlo.


Original GEANT-Zéro Monte Carlo Generator

CERN had its old GEANT program and they're still using GEANT-4 that spews out particles in Fortran. GEANT-Zéro really should be in a museum instead of this abandoned ?LEP Hangar? but CERN is very attached to the good old days of particle physics, when Nuclear sounded important. Here a technician wearing a lab coat and latex gloves drops the particles into a mechano-'opper (out of frame, left). The center dial is spun randomly and then physicists go for coffee. When they come back the first batch of Monte Carlo'd particles is ready. If there are still too many mesons or other troublesome particles, the new smaller sample is re-Monte Carlo'd.

If there are still problems with data or the usual disagreements in interpretation of data, there is the Roulette Option for testing algorithms and a weekend bus trip by Car is arranged to a nearby casino like Chamonix. Now of course they are called Collider Conferences and unfortunately some real work must be done. Presentations. Taking notes on the back of envelopes. The piercing question. Gone are the days of gleaming prop planes chartered to Monaco with physicists waving their perpetual sandwiches, talking and too busy to eat.

Still we can't be sure exactly what happened to the CMS data. It seems to have gone through both systems and came out without a scratch. Blasted mesons! Troublesome little things getting in the way of serious data like pixel performance. Is that the only answer?

Of course there should be New Physics but this is just too soon for that. A few small collisions at low power for CMS calibration. But CERN should remember that New Physics comes mostly from physicists and not the collider. Unexpected results may have unexpected causes. Studies should be done. Trying to elbow the mesons out of the collider and worry about them later when there are more of them interfering with data, sounds rather medieval. Especially when it is possible that some Kaons might form Strangelets and then you'd have a real 5-star collider emergency. More on Strangelets later.

But a second event at the CMS should have alerted 2,500 physicists about the extra muons.

The Strange Case Of The Misbehaving Magnet

The other totally unexpected main event at CMS this past December hasn't been advertised at all by CERN.

Seems the CMS actually does increase beam power when its On. CERN discovered the effect over the entire 27 km length of beams. From this Steve Meyer's Powerpoint slide shown (below) at the December 18, 2009 CERN meeting, we see the ideal "Santa Klaus" proton beam whipping around very near the speed of light.

CMS Off, Santa Ho Ho Ho

CMS On, What Happened Santa?

Beam energy changes? And that's at the usual operating power of 3.8 Tesla in the CMS, ring magnets much weaker to handle low energy 1.18 TeV beams at that time. Earth's field is an extremely low 0.000032 Tesla in comparison.

What about collisions in the CMS detector/reactor? Will they too be more powerful? Will the extreme magnetic field of CMS sustain a fusion reaction between beams or sustain collider objects produced? Need some physics papers on this, but like a lot of other risk scenarios, lower power colliders are taken as proof of safety. But no collider before the LHC is remotely equivalent.

You would think there would be a big buzz at Chamonix, the CERN conference last month, but I couldn't find anything on the CMS boosting beam energy in the many reports presented on the LHC. One of those things no physicist will forget to talk about, at least over coffee. A first in collider physics. Being studied now certainly by CERN, but CERN's not waiting for studies. The unstoppable LHC is being powered up again for new beams. Will CERN be more cautious about running experiments? Yes, there's already been an encouraging change to the beam schedule. The first run will be back to 0.45 TeV injection beams instead of a jump to 3.5 TeV. Though CERN has been powering the ring magnets to handle these higher energies. The LHC could still jump through the 3.5 TeV hoop in a day.

But CERN has more to worry about.

After all there was another unexplained event in the same Myers' presentation, P24 screenshot of "Food for thought – V blow up of beam 2" or the LHC's first beam explosion December 11, 2009. More on that later.

Two Added Trajectory Energies To Destroy The LHC?

Higher than expected energies as in Part 2 might be higher still with another Trajectory Energy added to the mix.

You have the 3.8 Tesla CMS magnetic bottle to contain the fusion reaction as in other ordinary fusion reactors, but at the LHC beams are forcibly circulated through it. Part of the effect? Beams push their way through the extremely high CMS magnetic field. In a similar way, Richard Shurtleff's added Trajectory Energy for beams through gravity could also be applied to beams through extremely high magnetic fields, I would say.

Proofs Available From CMS?

The CMS apparent boost to beam energy, looks like a proof of this new added Trajectory Energy through magnetic fields.

The 'discarded' extra unexpected muons produced also in CMS suggest collision energies were higher than 2.36 TeV and so produced more muons. This could be a proof of Shurtleff's original Trajectory Energy through gravity and would include the other Trajectory Energy I'm proposing through magnetic fields at CMS.

Both energies might be magnified at higher and higher TeV.

On Trajectory Energy added by gravity interactions, Shurtleff thinks that at higher and higher TeV energies, ultimately energies of LHC 14 TeV collisions could double to 28 TeV. And that's without considering the other Trajectory Energy.

To paraphrase Holmes, when you eliminate the impossible, you are left with the probable and the unknown.

It's up to CERN to find out what they are dealing with. They have the physicists and about half the world's supply of them. Powering up the collider blithely to 3.5 TeV and for 7 TeV collisions could have other unexpected results like destruction of the LHC.

The Elusive Obvious Effect When Gravity Is Considered Weak

If you force particles through a vacuum pipe at maximum speed near light speed and that's always your constant, with enough RF or microwave energy applied for 3.5 TeV, you have a 3.5 TeV beam. Do the same thing against gravity and you have 3.5 TeV plus you've added extra energy to overcome the gravity or G.

But here's the thinking: Gravity is weak and so can be disregarded. Usually left out of equations. Maybe not so weak. Maybe it's a force acting on several dimensions, and only appears to be weak. Physicists are still trying to understand Quantum gravity. LHC beams also work on a Quantum scale. What will happen?

Force your beam against an extreme magnetic field M, and you have 3.5 TeV plus G and plus M or 2 added Trajectory Energies in addition to 3.5 TeV. Anyone care for a game of Quantum magnetism?

Say if you had water instead of a vacuum in your beam pipe, you would have to overcome the drag by water with more energy W to achieve the same near light speed and energy or particle density of your beam. Here W=G+M. Giddings and Mangano are you listening?

Considering CERN has invested in 9,300 superconducting magnets all supercooled at super expense, you think electro-magnetism and extreme fields would be well understood at the LHC. The CMS would be no surprise?

Anybody studying the effects of extreme magnetic fields on collisions and their products? Seems magnetic effects like gravity are ignored as unimportant as other small colliders haven't encountered problems. It's Collider Weather. What can you do about it anyway?

Could be a similar effect with the other main detectors like ATLAS that also has a similar tremendous but toroidal magnetic field. Also a solenoid, tricky combo. Can somebody check? Hey Steve!

Back To Observed Effects At CMS And The LHC

CERN should be able to measure the boost noted in December in beam energies achieved by CMS when beams were at 1.18 TeV. OK, so try again then to duplicate and study this before going to higher energies. Why not announce the need to run the LHC again at 1.18 TeV to double check findings? No, nothing. Is CERN still in a hurry to get glamorous 7 TeV collisions? Leaving upstart colliders, like RHIC getting the glory for Quark Soup, in the dust.

That's it. Can't think of everything and so we find out by experiment: Saves time to go ahead beams blazing, if the experiment doesn't destroy the LHC.

Still it's been the case at the LHC until the accident of 2008, that machine effects don't matter. Physicists tell engineers what they want and that's what they'll get. Not in 2008. And then a hundred committees try to coordinate everything. Fiddly stuff gets scrutinized under a microscope and the big stuff like untested unmonitored busbars or mounting radiation hazards falls through the cracks with a boom.

This was a disregard of known hazards at other colliders. Complicated by obsession and ambition. If CERN had been paying serious attention to all these articles in The Science of Conundrums about known hazards, and shortfalls at the LHC due to extreme complexity of the project and the resulting 27 km machine, CERN might have reconsidered their hurry-up mission for New Physics. In the end the LHC experiment was obviously dependent on billions of dollars of hardware working and working safely. It didn't. Now add unknown beams and collisions?

Into The Unknown

We now come into the realm of the unknown being explored with unknown energies, by a machine maybe or maybe not in control of the unknown. It won't be the control room operators in CCC who will exercise the control, not when events will occur literally a few meters short of light speed. The machine will be in charge.

Of course there will be unknown effects and unknown interactions. Physicists have been surprised many times by their own research. But here the scale of research at the giant LHC into New States of Matter called a much friendlier New Physics, is of a vastly different order.

Although physicists and engineers can anticipate what might happen based on what they know, the machine is a machine, sometimes reliable, sometimes not. What they don't know, what the machine isn't built for, is what they can't handle. Here's the big thrill element. Can we beat the odds, can we go where no collider has gone before?

Who Decides?

Should we take a chance? Point that 27 km collider at Geneva? Half power or full power? It's not really CERN's decision. It's not even CERN's collider or CERN's money. Paid for by taxpayers. Owned by taxpayers. There are 2 million of them a stone's throw from ATLAS. No one in Geneva was asked if they wanted this collider in their backyard. Why not put the question to these good people? Let them decide. Isn't that fair?

Talk to the people about Spooky Quantum Effects that will come as a complete surprise. Probability zero of course. Tell them CERN has decided on the unknown, that all LHC risks are ZERO. What a relief. Thanks CERN PR.

LHC ReReStart In Progress

Watch any of 20 LHC Live Status Pages from this link.

The LHC is being prepared for injection energies of 0.45 TeV per beam. Once beams are injected into the 27 km ring, then they can be ramped up to higher energies quickly, as high as 3.5 TeV per beam this year and collisions could follow soon at a maximum of 7 TeV in any of the detectors.

Another little glitch on LHC1 (click above) "problem on the PCs of the triplet--access needed--No beam before 8 h tomorrow"

There really isn't any word from CERN on a schedule, not on their websites or even from CERN on Twitter. You can see why. But still what is CERN going to do? Jump quickly, go slow, play bunker ping-pong? Spooky.

From The CERN X Files

Finally this update from CERN physicist Lucio Rossi, confirming several crucial LHC machine safety issues in the fault-prone superconducting magnet systems that failed in 2008. His review of the 2008 accident is discussed in Nature News, Feb 23, 2010, "Did design flaws doom the LHC?":

Catastrophic failure that caused accelerator shutdown was not a freak accident, says project physicist.

Rossi's paper appears in IOP, "Superconductivity: its role, its success and its setbacks in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN".

Rossi concludes in part:

"The incident also revealed a lack of adequate risk analysis (maximum MCI) [Maximum Credible Incident] and of understanding all consequences, as well as an incomplete global magnet circuit protection analysis and an inadequate detection of a dangerous situation. . . ."

You'll find a less academic account of busbar bugaboos in my "LHC Beams Back To Life".

Finally, if CERN were infallible they wouldn't need a $10 Billion collider to find out what they don't know. I don't remember Einstein ordering a collider. His research budget was a few logs on the fire, the "lazy dog" according to Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein's professors.

This is Part 4 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Part3: Higgs Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider / More Delays

--Alan Gillis

Hawking Partly Wrong

NewsHammer Exclusive Peter Higgs with CERN's Tejinder Virdee and get-this: Under the hood of the giant solenoid CMS 12,500 tonne detector behind them you've got a radiator leaking water like a '72 Chevy. The new and mighty CMS, our favorite experiment, one of 4 beautiful cathedral-size detectors or reactors, but CERN won't call them that, has 272 zones of corrosion. Plus unlike any Chevy anywhere it even leaks its coolant directly into the engine. But that was December, a cold month, about 25 gallons or a 100 liters of water with the CMS plugged in, CMS On, spilling inside. See the candid report in the CMS Times, "CMS Winter Shutdown Adventure".

Don't worry, none of the 1,000,000 signal channels were affected. CERN didn't really say one way or the other, but not saying exactly anything at CERN always means there are no safety issues. Damage of course was minor. I suppose we are being asked to theorize a quick wipedown by CERN technicians insured a total recovery of all systems, even unaffected systems that might have been at risk. Though how did the technicians get inside? It took them 10.5 days to break in, a bit late for a quick wipedown. Though with a lot of official CERN hot air always present at the LHC, it could have been easily diverted directly into CMS. The blow-dry operation would be the intervention of choice for the "incident", as CERN hot air is considered very hot in comparison to other smaller collider PR.

CMS is maybe still down for 272 corrosion repairs due to other leaks, spotted once technicians got inside for the quick wipedown. A second burst pipe and flooding of the CMS Control Room two years running has been fixed again. 4,000 fault-prone connectors mistakenly installed in a new giant safety system, to replace an old system that failed in 2008, the nQPS or new Quench Protection System, have been replaced. That's why in part, the collider hasn't been going anywhere over the very long and bumpy "Technical Stop" since December in case you were wondering what happened to $10 Billion and 10,000 physicists trying to hitch a ride on the LHC Eurostar.

That's the latest from CERN, a fast train as an equivalent to an LHC beam. Not the power of 1700 Nuclear Power Plants, as discussed in "Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected". By the way, the Two Mosquitoes Line, a long-running embarrassment bewildering even for collider kids, was shutdown and deleted from all CERN websites in a surprising retreat from CERN hot air physics. Looks like the CERN-EuroDisney merger is at a "Technical Stop".


Leaky CMS/ First Quantum Bench Test

Results not in.

Anyway, why leaks, especially water leaks in a new CMS that cost a fortune to build? The CMS gets very hot when it powers down. At its ordinary field strength of 3.8 Tesla it operates at about 18,000 Amps. It's supposed to power down gradually, but sometimes it can crash, like when there's a power failure. Then it can get hot enough to smoke.

During a crashdown test a couple of years ago, you could see a cloud of steam rising in a series of CERN photos which used to be available from CMS. That in itself could have damaged water lines and caused the later big spill and corrosion.

Other though unplanned "incidents" might have contributed:

Monday [August 3, 2009] at 2:19 PM, when a power cut on the CERN general network caused a slow discharge that turned into a fast dump a few seconds later. Investigations are ongoing to understand the switching from the preferred slow discharge to the faster dump which, while being a throughly tested part of the CMS operations, raises the temperature of the coil to 70K, thus requiring three days to cool down again to 4K before current can be injected again.

"5am 9 Nov [2009]: “Glitch” in CMS solenoid cryogenics system caused magnet to ramp down to 2.3T."

"[as of December 7, 2009] CERN power outage Tuesday night . . . trip of tracker cooling plant. . . . 3 or 4 cases . . . CMS solenoid magnet cryo dry compressors stopped. Field dropped from 3.8 T to 3.5 T. . . . slow current dump of CMS solenoid. Went down to 2.7 T. . . . Down most of today due to another power glitch"

Mounting Radiation Hazards In Cooling Water

Not that everything has been going smoothly. A lot of water is used as coolant at the LHC, including for some Septum Magnets that suffered heavy radiation damage and had to be replaced in 2004, "SEPTUM MAGNET MNP-23 FOR THE CERN PS EXPERIMENTAL AREA
AND ITS FAST INTERLOCK SYSTEM". With the recent revelations about mounting radiation hazards during collider operations, ignored for 10-15 years in ring tunnels according to Steve Meyers Head of Accelerators, in "Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday", it looks like some people in CERN Maintenance were well aware of the potential problems. Doesn't anybody at CERN read CERN docs?

That also means mounting radiation hazards in many LHC cooling water systems, including the colossal CMS solenoid surprisingly also partly cooled by water, and leaking too. Hope there's a new study and some action on this, before radioactive waste water finds itself in nearby Lake Geneva.

The LHC Collimator System where relatively exposed beams are focused is also cooled by water in part, though like in the CMS system it's hard to imagine an idea like this being approved by a CERN Committee of Experts. Here's the full January report from Chamonix, "Summary of the Collimation Upgrade Plans" and the smoking gun slide on P38.

Perhaps it's time for a little more foresight.

LHC On Target Again For Re-ReStart

Late January, February, Mid-February, March, February 20th (Official), February 25 (Rumor), After Monday but no firm date (Official, sometime after Monday February 22)

Jump to 3.5 TeV, no back to injection energy 0.45 TeV. Slow ramp? Not perfectly clear yet. A good idea I'd say. One of those 3.5 TeV beams will be very hard to handle if the collider has another bad day.

Next in NewsHammer, more on CMS in The Strange Case Of The Misbehaving Magnet At The LHC

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 3 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Exclusive After a brief and successful restart this November, the Large Hadron Collider is on standby until March for more fixes and re-commissioning to higher energies. It's an uncharacteristic and surprising move by CERN, four years behind schedule and billions over budget on the $10 Billion collider, but a welcome go-slow approach to machine safety.

In September 2008 days after start-up a $40 Million accident crippled the LHC for over a year. Until the surprise winter break, CERN's objectives were for 3.5 TeV beams by the end of 2009 instead of the 1.18 TeV beams achieved, though with a bonus of some test collisions at a record 2.36 TeV.

Data highlights of CMS collisions have just been released in an article on MIT News. The big surprises were high numbers of mesons produced, and those numbers increased faster with collision energies, not predicted by models based on lower energy collisions at other colliders. CMS will publish its formal paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Why Stop There? 2.36 TeV instead of 7 TeV

The abrupt end to commissioning in December at higher energies also surprised CERNies on site besides fans of the LHC. It wasn't because of the usual winter shutdown over the holidays. Safety concerns won over speed. Going to higher TeV meant jumping over another threshold in magnet powering, above 2,000 Amps. With so many magnets damaged last time during the 2008 busbar accident, Steve Meyers, CERN's #1 collider guy, decided to go slow again. Anyway the leaky CMS experiment and the faulty nQPS, the new Quench Protection System for the thousands of magnets, were also having trouble big time.

2010-2011 LHC Run 18-24 Months at 3.5 TeV per Beam

After a rethink last week at Chamonix, the collider's favorite ski resort, CERN has decided on going slower still. After current repairs and retrofits that should be completed by mid-February, now pushed ahead to March (don't ask) the LHC will aim for 3.5 TeV beams and 7 TeV collisions or 7 Tera or 7 Trillion Electron Volts, over the next 18 to 24 months, shutting down for lengthy major safety retrofits for possibly a year. Then in 2013 commissioning to 7 TeV per beam and 14 TeV collisions. Alarmingly sensible. Collider safety taking precedence? Congratulations, CERN.

Though potentially more dangerous heavy lead ion collisions, are now off the back burner and might start this Fall.

Unforeseen Radiation and $235 Million to $Billions More In Upgrades

More surprises at Chamonix. The end of January 5 day event, largely a study of safety at 5 TeV per beam, current LHC status of safety upgrades, and future safety upgrades, was more of the usual data avalanche. Here comes the check for the big holiday blowout.

Including new amazing unforeseen radiation hazards that will develop as the collider runs (Session 6--Radiation to Electronics) to deficiencies in the pre-accelerators (Session 8) including Electron Cloud trouble, and aging equipment and a need for higher energy injection beams with more bunches per beam or Billions More Dollars in upgrades. Maybe 100 Million Swiss Francs in civil engineering to move huge power supplies away from radiation zones, unknown but substantial costs to shield and/or redesign and replace equipment prone to radiation damage. Maybe at a minimum 1.3 or 1.4 Billion SF to upgrade pre-accelerators, probably much more if aging systems need full replacement. And more major upgrades to ventilation equipment including more ventilation shafts that were alarmingly inadequate for the 6 ton spill of Helium in 2008.

Here's the schedule and presentation abstracts including links to CERN docs and slides, "LHC Performance Workshop - Chamonix 2010". A "Summary of the ....", the webcast of February 5 and now a 2 part video from CERN, covers the main points made at Chamonix. Here's the abstract of the video, including links to docs cited and slides shown.

An important but informal end comment from the DG, Dr Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the new Director General of CERN since January 2009, didn't make it to video.

After Steve Meyers overview of radiation hazards developing and damaging equipment, to answer the big unspoken question hanging in the air, Meyers said:

"I think a declaration 10 or 15 years ago that the underground service areas in the LHC were non-radiation areas."

After Meyer's conclusions, Dr Heuer, sitting in his seat up front summed up his thoughts this way to the CERN audience:

"Instead of making decisions every 3 months, I prefer to have enough time to think it over."

A radical change from last year's we're good to go to 5 TeV per beam and gradual installation of more safety systems over the next 5 years. The estimate back in July for safety after $40 M in repairs was a whopping $235 Million extra in "LHC Status by Steve Meyers..." CERN video, still ignored by the media for safety the collider should have had before the accident of 2008. No CERN press release, that must be it. The new faster CERN schedule on safety upgrades will still mean spending the $235 M, while $1 to $2 Billion more on other upgrades thanks to the Chamonix review is now being considered. Hard to recall the LHC is a new collider.

One thing CERN forgot was the $1 Gazillion for Computer Systems Security including SCADA and Ethernet-Connected Instrumentation Systems. Why wait for the Trojans to attack?

All Ahead Slow: New Physics In Sight

If the LHC Machine is being re-engineered for more safety, it's the same old anything goes as to what the LHC might produce in terms of New Physics. Exciting not to know where physics is going, but hardly something to brag about. An army of the best minds in HEP don't have a clue? We're going to the Moon, but we might wind up on Mars or Venus or maybe we don't have enough thrust to go anywhere?

We've all read about it over and over again. Wow, the LHC is on the brink of answering the biggest questions in the Universe. Great. Where can I buy one? Or more realistically the LHC is an experiment with the unknown, with unknown consequences, with little in the way of safety studies and risk assessments.

As with design and engineering before the accident, CERN is still relying on its own considerable expertise in what will happen at the LHC with its experiments. It's what CERN doesn't do with all that expertise that raises some red flags on safety like not studying all the risk scenarios and not performing slow and difficult computer modeling of collider objects the LHC might produce and what they would do at the LHC.

CERN isn't worried, so why should we be? Well, CERN wasn't worried before the big accident CERN still calls "the incident". Accidents preventable, incidents happen. Now poised to go to extremely high energy collisions of 7 TeV as early as this March and ultimately to 14 TeV, the LHC may create objects like micro black holes that might threaten the planet.

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 1 of a report on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected