Photo Courtesy of CERN
When the World’s largest particle accelerator was fired up on September 10, it only got to operate for about a little over week before an electrical problem, causing a liquid Helium leak, forced the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to shut down operations. Researchers over at the European nuclear-research organization (a.k.a. CERN) have not yet determined the exact cause of the fault as they wait for parts of the accelerator that were supercooled to come back up to room temperature.
With the electrical problem to still be addressed it won’t be until next April 2009 before CERN resumes operations and once again turns on the LHC. The lengthy delay, however, isn’t necessarily caused by the problems at the LHC, but rather the season for which all accelerators that run in France are shutdown between November 15th through April to reduce the Winter load on the country’s electrical grid. So it would seem CERN has plenty of time to get the bugs addressed at the LHC before the switch is turned back on in April – where once again they will put the collider through its paces before experimenting with the subatomic beginnings of the Universe.
Read more at CNET.