Spanner in the works: A giant magnet weighing 1,920 tonnes sits inside the LHC at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
Credit: AFP
GENEVA: The multi-billion-dollar machine designed to shed light on the nature of the universe will be out of action until at least the second quarter of 2009, says CERN.
Experts said a faulty electrical connection between magnets was likely to blame for a large helium leak which caused the Large Hadron Collider to be shut down last Thursday owing to a fault with its cooling system.
"Before a full understanding of the incident can be established, however, the sector has to be brought to room temperature and the magnets involved opened up for inspection," said the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Winter maintenance
"The time necessary for the investigation and repairs precludes a restart before CERN's obligatory winter maintenance period, bringing the date for restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009," it added.
Scientists had managed to restart the LHC again last Friday, only for it to break down later in the day.
The LHC is a 27-kilometre circular tunnel in which parallel beams of protons accelerate close to the speed of light. It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged some 13.7 billion years ago.
Counter-rotating beams, comprising strings of protons, are whizzed around the tunnel and then are smashed together in four huge laboratories. Arrays of detectors swathing the walls of these chambers trace the sub-atomic rubble spewed out from the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.
"Pushing technological limits"
"The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas," said Peter Limon, who was responsible for commissioning the world's first large-scale superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in the United States.
"Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases," he said.
The LHC inauguration ceremony scheduled for October 21, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy was set to attend, will now be delayed.
