Delays push back Hadron Collider's restart date

The group in charge of the Large Hadron Collider said further tests to the massive particle accelerator will push its scheduled startup back another two to three weeks and into October.

But the head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which goes by the French acronym CERN, said they are confident the machine will be operational before a scheduled Christmas break.

"The bottom line is that we remain on course to restart the LHC safely this year, albeit currently about two to three weeks later than we’d hoped," wrote CERN Director General Rolf Heuer on the organization's blog.

The collider, which lies underground near the Franco-Swiss border, was shut down after nine days of operation on Sept. 19, 2008, after the meltdown of a small electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-km-long tunnel that houses the accelerator.

The collider is designed to push protons using a ring of super-cooled magnets to speeds and energies never before reached under controlled conditions, and crash them into one another to create and detect a host of new particles.

The giant magnets in the LHC — many weighing around 30 tonnes — are cooled at temperatures near absolute zero to make them superconductive and thus better able to accelerate the particles to high speeds.

Numerous delays

Scientists have been eagerly awaiting the startup of the machine. They are hoping it will provide information on the characteristics of particles that for now are only theoretical. Scientists are also hoping it will help uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.

Numerous delays, however, have forced them to be patient.

The collider took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $3.8 billion, with a total expected cost of more than $9 billion. CERN also announced that while expected to be operational in October, the collider is not expected to run at energies higher than five teraelectron volts — or five trillion electron volts — of energy.

The collider is built to reach energies of seven teraelectron volts; however Heuer said the current testing of the collider has revealed that more work is needed before these higher energies can be reached.

That work will be conducted during later planned shutdown times, said Heuer.