Saturday, September 20, 2008

"One of the eight sectors of the giant [Large Hadron Collider] machine will now have to return to room temperature and pressure for the magnet to be repaired, or even replaced, if necessary. While a repair of the magnet itself would take no more than two days, it will take "several weeks" to warm up the sector and then another "several weeks" to cool it down again, explained Gillies.

The magnets in that sector will have to be pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K, or 80 deg above absolute zero ) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K)."

-- Daily Telegraph

No comments: