The world's largest particle collider has been shut down for at least two months due to a large helium leak stemming from an incident on Friday, officials said.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a gigantic particle accelerator located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground, was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as Cern.
The collider was officially launched on 10 September when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. On the heels of an earlier malfunction due to a faulty transformer, Cern said Friday's incident was most likely caused "by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure". At no time was there any risk to people, Cern added.
Although a full investigation is still under way, Cern announced on Saturday that the section of the tunnel will have to be "warmed up" for repairs, which means the LHC will be down for at least two months.
The LHC experiments involve accelerating two beams of subatomic particles — called hadrons — in opposite directions to more than 99.9 percent the speed of light. Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles for physicists to study using special detectors.
The result is expected to push forward theories of particle physics and the fundamental building blocks of all things. The LHC was designed primarily as an attempt to produce the 'Higgs boson', a hypothetical particle whose observation would help confirm some of the predictions in the Standard Model of physics. Other currently theoretical particles may also be observed for the first time, including microscopic black holes.
Some have theorised that the black-hole experiments could go wrong with catastrophic results, but Cern has done extensive safety analysis and has repeatedly denied any such threat.
Talkback
"Some have theorised that the black-hole experiments could go wrong with catastrophic results, but Cern has done extensive safety analysis and has repeatedly denied any such threat."
...but it would seem basic electrical systems weren't included in the extensive safety analysis. Somewhat less-than-reassuring. It makes me wonder what the real purpose of the collider is, considering the massive scale and expense of the project and the colossal failure of the project so early in the startup.
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That a machine that's 17 miles long, has thousands of newly developed parts and relies upon superconducting magnets that need immersion in liquid helium should work perfectly on its first real test.
I was pretty surprised that they managed to get as far as they did before something was found to be faulty.
As to the fear of a black hole gobbling up the Earth, Nature can still produce far more energetic collisions with the Earth than the LHC can ever generate. These collisions have been happening for billions of years on every planet in the Universe yet somehow they're still around!