The LEP had its own food problems

It’s Friday afternoon, and as ever, I’m hitting ‘refresh’ on the CERN website to see what terror/food related incident might happen next. While I’m waiting, last week’s baguette story prompted my colleague, Declan Butler, to tell me another tale: The time two beer bottles were found inside of one of CERN’s machines. The story is so incredible, and so reminiscent of the recent baguette debacle, that I think it deserves retelling.

The year was 1996 and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn’t even exist yet. At the time, CERN physicists were working on another machine called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). The LEP occupied the same 27 km ring that now houses the LHC, but instead of accelerating protons, it accelerated electrons and their antiparticles, positrons.

Physicists were just completing an upgrade to the LEP that would allow it to better measure the W+ and W- bosons, which help to moderate the weak nuclear force. In June, they were just about to begin their run with the upgraded machine when they ran into an unexpected snag. Technicians were injecting beams, but it wasn’t getting around the whole circuit. After careful investigation, they found the cause—a pair of Heineken bottles wedged into the beam pipe.

The LEP was much less powerful and far simpler than the LHC. Instead of using huge superconducting magnets to guide its beams around the ring, the LEP used regular old steel magnets. That meant that the central beam pipes, which circulated the electrons and positrons was much more easily accessible, and repairs could be made fairly quickly.

Nevertheless, the incident was considered serious enough that the police were called in to investigate the sabotage. I called CERN spokesman James Gillies for an update on the case. “We never found out who it was,” he says. To this day, he says “we don’t know whether it was malicious or not”.

We’re making Declan’s original story available for a week. Have a look!

Image: CERN