The massive particle collider built to simulate the conditions of the “Big Bang” will not restart until spring 2009 after a technical glitch forced its shutdown, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.
Experts have been down into the 17-mile tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to see what they could determine about the damage.
A helium leak into the tunnel housing, the biggest and most complex machine ever made, forced CERN to shut down its LHC Saturday, just 10 days after starting it up.
CERN Director-General Robert Aymar said this was a psychological blow after a successful start of the LHC following years of painstaking preparation by teams of scientists.
“I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application,” he said in a statement.
CERN said they will still have to wait several weeks before the temperature can be raised from near absolute zero so that they can go inside the equipment to examine the extent of the damage, said spokesperson James Gillies.
“They’re going to have to open up and really investigate what went on there,” Gillies said. “So that’s going to be two or three weeks before we can put out something that we’re sure of.”
“The winter shutdown will go according to schedule, which means that we start up the accelerator complex in the spring months.”
Only then will the LHC be able to collide protons, revealing how the tiniest particles were first created after the “big bang.”
Both the investigation and repairs, followed by CERN’s winter maintenance period, will push back the restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009.
CERN will then resume sending beams of particles around the tunnel, then the next step is to smash beams traveling in opposite directions into each other at the speed of light.
That, said Gillies, “is something that we do every year and it’s something we have a lot of experience in doing, so there’s no reason to think that that would not go rather quickly. I suspect that the priority for the restart next year will be to get LHC beams as quickly as possible.”
The new collider was revealed September 10th, but a transformer failed about 36 hours after startup. However, that was a simple fix because it was outside the cold zone. The machine was ready to go again when the electrical fault occurred.
Scientists hope the powerful LHC will reveal more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.
Experts also want to find evidence of a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. It is sometimes called the “God particle” because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and therefore to matter that makes up the universe.
Scientists once believed protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom’s nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.
Skeptics have expressed fears that the high-energy collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes, which are subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
CERN, says there was never any risk to people from the malfunction, and maintain the project is safe.
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