quench
n.— «During a power test, the very last before collisions could start in the machine (to the annoyance of engineers), a fault led to a warming of the busbar. As superconductivity was lost, the temperature soared in a “quench.” The machine is designed to deal with quenches, said Dr David Sankey of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire. “In general the quench protection system should intervene, firing heaters in the rest of the magnet to avoid a local hot spot by sending the whole system normal and also dumping the current.”» —“Large Hadron Collider: How a little bang killed the Big Bang” by Roger Highfield Telegraph (United Kingdom) Sept. 24, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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