Hadron Collider Suffers Power Outage
The Large Hadron Collider’s machine systems are now recovering from a recent general power cut.
The organization that runs the LHC, CERN, said it had taken until Monday morning for the machine to fully recover.
According to a spokesperson, the electrical cut on Friday may have been caused by storms.
The collider is in a technical stop that is allowing technicians access to its 16-mile long tunnel.
A spokesperson said a technical stop had already been scheduled for this week.
James Gillies, director of communications at CERN in Geneva, told BBC News that there would be no particle beams in the LHC before Wednesday.
The $10 billion collider is being used to smash protons particles together in order to shed light on the nature of the universe.
Physicists have said that if things continued as planned, the collider could soon help determine a new mass range where novel sub-atomic particles are thought to exist.
A spokesperson stressed that power cuts occur periodically.
In November 2009, a previous electrical cut halted the machine when a bird dropped a piece of bread it was eating at one of the potions where the mains electricity supply enters the collider from above ground.
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