Particle Physicists Use Electrical Tape To Patch Tevatron
Tevatron FermilabFaulty seal would have caused frustrating delays In particle physics, as in so many other parts of life, there are few things more useful than a trusty roll of tape. Just before Labor Day, physicists working with Fermilab's Tevatron wrapped up a planned four-week accelerator shutdown and were looking forward to getting back to work. But pressure started building in the Tevatron's vacuum system, and experiments were halted while engineers isolated the problem. They found a faulty O-ring, which seals the vacuum between two superconducting magnets, according to an account on Fermilab Today. The Tevatron is about four miles in circumference and involves about a thousand superconducting magnets, which accelerate protons and antiprotons to super-sized energies. The magnets are cooled with liquid helium so that they consume only one-third of the power they would normally require. Replacing the O-ring seal would have required shutting down the Tevatron for at least 10...