After the short circuit (or quench for enthusiasts) at the LHC on September 19 last year, progress was halted and research had stopped. Repair work underway at the LHC is continuing at maximum speed and the LHC is expected to be ready for operation by September this year.
EMCal installation at ALICE
One of the major milestones in the repair work involved repairing the superconducting dipoles which were damaged last year, when the Helium gas released caused the temperatures in the dipoles to be raised by approximately 100 Kelvins. The 4.8 km long superconducting dipoles in the Sectors 3 and 4 of the LHC were inspected by hand and then cleaned from the soot created by last year’s accident. Out of the 29 superconducting magnets damaged in the incident, 20 have been replaced.
Meanwhile electromagnetic calorimeters have been installed at ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), which is a part of the LHC project. The ALICE project aims to exploit nucleus-nucleus interactions to generate a quark-gluon plasma, a phase of quantum chromodynamics that exists at extremely high energies (requiring around 2.6 TeV of energy).
A Quark-Gluon Plasma path detection
Let’s hope that mankind’s biggest ever scientific experiment proceeds well and we are able to answer the fundamental questions of sub-atomic physics.
Source : The CERN Bulletin
