Damage to atom smasher forces two-month halt

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-21 11:03

CERN announced Thursday that it had shut down the collider a week ago after a successful startup that had beams of protons circling in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions in the collider.

The world's most powerful atom-smasher, LHC, will be down for two months as a section will have to be repaired because of a fault, a spokesman for CERN has said. [Agencies]

It was at first thought the failure of an electrical transformer that handles part of the cooling was the problem, CERN said. That transformer was replaced last weekend and the machine was lowered back to operating temperature to prepare for a resumption of operations.

But then more inspections were needed and it was determined that the problem was worse than initially thought, said Gillies.

The CERN experiments with the particle collider hope to reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. They could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC provides much greater power than earlier colliders.

Its start came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

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