Big particle collider to restart in September

GENEVA -- Additional safety features being added to the world's largest atom smasher will postpone its start-up until the end of September, a year after the $10 billion machine was sidelined by a simple electrical fault, the operator said Tuesday.

The cost of the repairs and added safety features has yet to be determined, but it will be covered by the regular budget of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, spokeswoman Christine Sutton said.

The 20-nation organization, known as CERN, has said previously that repairs will cost at least 25 million Swiss francs ($21.5 million), but the amount appears to have risen since scientists could review the extent of the damage and devise new safety features.

"The costs will certainly have to come out of our normal budget," Sutton said.

A faulty splice in the wiring shut down the Large Hadron Collider on Sept. 19, nine days after the machine started up with great fanfare. The resulting electrical arc damaged a section of the equipment and punctured an enclosure holding the liquid helium used to keep the collider at a temperature colder than outer space for maximum efficiency.

It has taken months to determine the full extent of the damage, which was limited to one of the eight sectors in the collider housed in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border on Geneva's outskirts.

Scientists have taken the setback in stride, saying that particle colliders always have such problems in the start-up phase.

The massive machine was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms into each other at high energy and record what particles are produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the universe and everything in it.

They hope the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing quickly.