#electron clouds

New Post has been published on http://www.newsnish.com/technology/science/high-energy-lhc-plans-held-up-by-ufos-and-electron-clouds/

High-energy LHC plans held up by UFOs and electron clouds

High-energy LHC plans held up by UFOs and electron clouds

ALWAYS expect the unexpected. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland say that plans to run their experiments at higher energies are likely to be delayed until next year. And it is down to what are playfully known as unidentified falling objects, or UFOs. The LHC was rebooted in April, after a two-year shutdown to upgrade the machine. In its second run, it will collect data on the highest-energy collisions of particle beams ever. But researchers in charge of getting it up and running again have revealed that things haven’t gone quite as planned. This week they presented the first report on the LHC’s performance at a conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

They say clouds of electrons created by ionised gas in the beam chamber and microscopic dust particles – UFOs – are interrupting the beams and making it harder to get the LHC running consistently.

The team is only a few weeks behind schedule in preparing beams for the experiments. But because the quality of the beam gets better and more stable the longer it runs, there won’t be time this year to reach peak performance.