LHC@home

Thought I'd throw that question out there.

If one of the thousands of magnets fails (ie, has a coolant leak), is the system able to compensate for that change in magnetism?
Does the beam automatically hit the wall and cut through 20 meters of copper in that event?

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I'm not the LHC Alex. Just a number cruncher like everyone else here.

If The Manhattan Project of many years ago is any indicator - there will be a lot of assembling and dis-assembling of the equipment. Based on the size of this project, such a failure will happen too quickly to allow protective devices to react ....

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If I've lived this long, I've gotta be that old

In fact you've hit upon one of the harder design problems of both the LHC and the proposed ILC. It is handled by the Machine Protection System, which consists of collimators and fast pulsed magnets that kick the beam into beam dumps. The collimators are designed to handle some amount of the beam slamming into them, and they prevent that beam from hitting the accelerator tube. But they can't handle the whole beam, so when a magnet fails, a signal must be sent to the kicker magnets to kick the beam into a dump. There, the energy in the rest of the beam can be handled.

Needless to say, things get really tricky if/when the kicker magnets fail!

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