A mini black hole
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Bits that stop the Big Bang boys going boom
By Pete CastleSeptember 24, 2008
A Farnborough company has played a valuable role in the experiment trying to uncover the secrets of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Cern, near Geneva, is designed to recreate in miniature the conditions moments after the Big Bang. It is probably the most highly anticipated scientific experiments ever.
But while the world’s attention has been focused on Cern’s headquarters in recent days as the £5billion experiment gets over early teething problems, a small company in Farnborough is watching with interest.
Staff at Crawford, Hansford and Kimber, located behind the Holiday Inn in Farnborough Road, played a small but vital role in bringing the LHC project to fruition.
The company, which normally employs around 20 staff dealing with small batch orders of electrical components and printed circuit boards, was given one of its biggest ever jobs by the Cern team — helping design, build and test 11,000 vital components for the project.
From its small, single-storey factory tucked away in Farnborough, the company built thousands of units for the LHC’s quench heating system, a safety system that helps prevent the multi-billion pound experiment going up in a puff of smoke.
John Simmonds, the company’s owner and managing director, said the order was one of the biggest the company had ever dealt with in its 63-year history.
“It was around £500,000 worth of business for us, so it was quite a big order and quite a prestigious client,” he added.
Mr Simmonds, who has owned the company since 1997, explained how the components helped the safety system to work.
“If the equipment which keeps it at a very low temperature fails and the temperature rises very quickly, particularly in the area of the magnets, there could be a fire, or worse, possibly an explosion,” he said.
“The thing is to bring in an emergency power supply and bring up the heat until it reaches a normal temperature. At Cern, there are thousands of these around the ring, distributed near the power supply by the magnets.”
The LHC needs very powerful magnets to bend a beam of protons — tiny particles — around a 17-mile long ring-shaped underground pipe.
Scientists then smash these beams of protons into each other and watch the results on powerful detectors, which show the fall-out from the collisions.
It is hoped that what will be found could solve some of the biggest questions in particle physics, help explain what happened at the Big Bang, and even create extra dimensions to match seemingly outlandish quantum theories with scientific fact.
However, to be able to bend the beam around the circular ring, the LHC needs very strong super-conducting magnets that only operate at incredibly low temp-eratures, close to absolute zero — minus 273 degrees Celsius or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit.
With recent problems at the LHC centring on problems with these magnets heating up, the team at Crawford, Hansford and Kimber are hoping that their handiwork will do what it has been designed to do if there are any more problems.
Apart from the scientific headaches, the project has required a huge amount of engineering skill that the Farnborough company has contributed towards.
While initial designs for the component came from Cern, the engineers at Crawford, Hansford and Kimber used their expertise to suggest some design improvements and modifications before producing a prototype and testing it to Cern’s precise requirements.
After winning the order, the company set up a dedicated production line at an extra factory unit in Invincible Road, Farnborough, and tested each individual component before shipping them off to Geneva.
The process included a number of trips across to the Cern headquarters for the team, as well as visits from the Cern engineers to Farnborough, but once completed, the Crawford, Hansford and Kimber contract was considered a success.
On the trips to Switzerland, everyone involved could sense a palpable air of excitement, Mr Simmonds said.
“The people we met were definitely excited by it. There is a sense of excitement at Cern itself.
“A few of the people working on the project had no knowledge of it before we started working on it. We don’t normally deal with anything quite as powerful as that.
“Fortunately for us we got a nice big tick from them saying there weren’t any faults.”
The contract has led to hopes that the company could win new business, possibly including working on the next big pan-European science experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
In the south of France, scientists plan to try to reach a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology to generate electricity.
But for the time being, Crawford, Hansford and Kimber have gone back to their normal business, including making electric controls for the air conditioning industry.
“We are quite an old-fashioned company in some ways, even though we have been involved in some cutting-edge projects,” Mr Simmonds said.
“We are a sweaty, hands-on sort of company. We put everything together and do everything from the printed circuit boards up. In the past, we have very much kept ourselves to ourselves. But people seem to like working here.”
