That is the kind of observation that sometimes leads to great discoveries. It may be some well known phenomenon, but it must not be just considered a problem.
Let's hope that they have stumbled upon something really exciting. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Terry Blanton <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Dec 2, 2011 9:28 pm Subject: [Vo]:LHC plagued by UFOs Seriously, http://www.livescience.com/17207-ufos-disrupting-search-god-particle.html Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle ccelerator at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, are trying to slam articles together hard enough to break them into never-before-seen ieces, which could solve some of the biggest puzzles in nature. But UFOs — unidentified falling objects, that is — keep getting in their way. The LHC is a 17-mile (27-km) circular tunnel lined with powerful agnets, which accelerate protons (particles in the nuclei of atoms) o 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. Beams of these super-brisk rotons are accelerated clockwise around the ring and collide with eams traveling counter-clockwise, and, like a well-struck piñata, a ead-on hit produces a thrilling outburst of subatomic goodies. When hey turn the proton beams up to full power, the physicists hope to ind the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle," which is elieved to create the drag that gives everything else mass, among the ollision debris. They'll also look for dark matter, the invisible ubstance that permeates the outskirts of galaxies. However, since last year, something has been fluttering in the way of he proton beams and dampening the force of their blows, the hysicists say. These "UFOs" aren't from outer space — they're robably microscopic dust particles of unknown origin — but they're till mysterious, and while they're around, the prize goodies will ikely remain stashed. UFOs are "one of the major known limitations for the performance of he Large Hadron Collider," wrote Tobias Baer, a physicist working at he LHC, and colleagues in a paper for the recent IPAC2011 conference n San Sebastián, Spain. The researchers have spent the past few onths trying to characterize the UFOs, and are devising strategies to et rid of them. More than 10,000 possible UFO events — occasions when there were roton-beam losses thought to result from UFOs blocking the protons — ere observed between April and August, some so significant that they riggered "beam dumps," where the beam automatically shut down. Many f these events occurred in the electric arc that produces the beam of rotons, the researchers wrote. Because the events became more requent as the intensity of the proton beam increased, they "are xpected to be very critical for LHC operation at higher energies." Even more UFO events, and resulting beam dumps, happened at a point in he beam just past objects called injector kicker magnets (MKIs), uggesting that these magnets are a major source of the mystery bjects. The large impact of these UFOs implied that they were being ccelerated toward the proton beam by the magnets, which could only appen if the UFO particles were charged. "Many additional studies are ongoing to gain a more profound knowledge bout the behavior, impact and production mechanism of UFOs," Baer et l. wrote. <end> An unexpected greater mystery? Serendipidous Science! T
