CERN Gives Details On LHC Incident
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on Thursday that the forced shutdown of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last month was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets.
The shutdown occurred just 10 days after the large experiment began because of a helium leak in its tunnel. Scientists created the LHC with hopes of discovering new clues about the origins of the universe.
"This incident was unforeseen," CERN Director-General Robert Aymar said in a statement. "But I am now confident that we can make the necessary repairs, ensure that a similar incident can not happen in the future and move forward to achieving our research objectives."
The collider, built in a tunnel 100 meters (330 feet) below the ground and straddling the Franco-Swiss border on the outskirts of Geneva, will not restart until Spring 2009 because it had to be warmed up from its operating temperature of minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit so that the fault could be analyzed, CERN said.
By the time it could be cooled down again, CERN would have run into its annual winter maintenance.
No one was harmed as a result of the faulty electrical connection, and CERN has confirmed that it had spare components in hand to ensure LHC can restart next year.
When the collider began on September 10, critics claimed it was dangerous because it could create black holes that might swallow up the entire planet.
The LHC is intended to send beams of subatomic particles around the 17-mile (27-km) subterranean tunnel to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. The goal is to recreate conditions that occurred immediately after the “Big Bang,” which cosmologists believe is at the origin of our expanding universe.
These collisions will explode in a burst of energy and of new and previously unseen particles, whose existence, in some cases, has been predicted by particle physicists.
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