Various: The large number of electrical and vacuum issues effecting the Large Hadron Collider is having a trickle-down effect on both students and on researchers, some of whom are moving to Fermilab in an attempt to gather some data on the potential mass of the Higgs Boson.
Nature News reports on how a data drought is impacting students: Sara Bolognesi defended her PhD thesis last year on finding the Higgs boson based on theoretical calculations not data because of the LHC delays.
The long delays have ended the dreams of a generation of graduate students hoping to use fresh data for their theses. With no machine to deliver results, "people are doing experimental PhDs and effectively doing very little experimenting," says Will Reece, a graduate student at Imperial College London working on a detector known as LHCb. "It's a strange situation."
The New York Times's Dennis Overbye goes into more detail over the thousands of bad electrical connections that were discovered during the recent shut down to re-test the vacuum seals after last years accident.
Overbye says that CERN will announce a new schedule this week, and confirmed news that physicstoday.org reported two months ago that the collider will not now run 14 TeV collisions. Instead, due to the underperforming magnets, the collider will start operations at 8 TeV collisions.
In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.
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The CERN physicists in this case are providing a role model—by showing the public and students how scientists deal with problems and setbacks that they experience with machines such as the LHC.
Hopefully their determination to fix the collider will help school children learn to deal with setbacks in their science fair projects.