LHC to Restart in September, not Spring

by Karenke4 | February 10, 2009 at 10:36 am

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CERN has extended the timetable for the restart Large Hadron Collider to next September, not this Spring as had been hoped. Last September 19, just nine days after its initial start, the LHC suffered electrical problems that damaged 53 magnets, causing hydrogen leaks. The repairs and new cautionary measures are expected to cost upwards of 20 million euros.

The Large Hadron Collider is contained in a 17 mile long tunnel under the Swiss-French border. Over 1 billion people watched as protons first passed through the tunnel on September 10th. On September 19th, researchers were testing the electrical wiring to make sure that it could handle the massive currents needed to pass protons around the ring when the connection between two magnets melted, causing the cryogenic plumbing to be damaged. The plumbing keeps the superconducting magnets frigid at nearly -455.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Physicists and scientists from around the world have hopes that the LHC will produce the Higgs boson particle, to date unseen, which would shed light on multitudes of unanswered particle theories.

Once the LHC restarts it will be kept running throughout the winter and into autumn 2010 with a small break at Christmas “to allow people not to get divorced!” joked Sergio Bertolucci, the director for research and computing at CERN. During this time, the facility will be running tests with a collision energy of 10 TeV to ensure that the tests provide new physics results. Physicists around the world have been expecting to see interesting results from this €3 billion project since its expected launch in 2007.