Large Hadron Collider to Hibernate Until Spring

The helium leak which caused the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to shut down last Friday will mean that the LHC will be in hibernation until Spring 2009. While the repairs will take approximately two months, as I indicated earlier, the lab shuts down in the winter to save costs. Officials with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) decided not to restart the world's largest particle accelerator until next year.

While researchers have to wait until the affected section of tunnel warms up enough, CERN announced that the most likely cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets. In a press release CERN Director General Robert Aymar said:

"Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow. Nevertheless, the success of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex. I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigour and application."

Peter Limon, who was responsible for commissioning the world’s first large-scale superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in the USA, added:

"The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas. Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases."

While scientists hope to finally discover the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass (AKA the "God particle"), others are concerned that the LHC may actually bring the world to an end. Such concerns have led to death threats as well as hacking of the site's computers.

This break will give such as Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider time to continue their protests, and ensure that the world will survive until at least 2009.