Officials: Damage to collider forces 2-month halt

GENEVA -- The world's largest atom smasher — which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month — has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

CERN says the damage to its new particle collider was in a different place than a previous transformer failure. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says the new problem occurred during a test at high electrical current. The incident resulted in a large helium leak into the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

A statement said the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets. CERN spokesman James Gilles says the superconductor apparently stopped and the high current then proved too much for the wire connecting the magnets.

Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed up well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so that repairs can be made — a time-consuming process.

"A number of magnets raised their temperature by around 100 degrees," Gillies said. "We have now to warm up the whole sector in a controlled manner before we can actually go in and repair it."

The $10 billion particle collider, in the design and construction stages for more than two decades, is the world's largest atom smasher. It fires beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms around the tunnels at nearly the speed of light.

It then causes the protons to collide, revealing how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything.

Gillies said such failures occur frequently in particle accelerators, but it was made more complicated in this case because the Large Hadron Collider operates at near absolute zero, colder than outer space, for maximum efficiency.

"When they happen in our other accelerators, it's a matter of a couple of days to fix them," Gillies said. "But because this is a superconducting machine and you've got long warmup and cool-down periods, it means we're going to be off for a couple of months."