The Large Hadron Collider could be restarted at the end of September — a year after the world's largest particle accelerator was knocked off line by an electrical malfunction.
LHC operations were suspended last September after a transformer malfunction in its cooling system allowed a helium leak — just nine days after the project became operational. An investigation concluded that the malfunction was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets.
As a result, the 53 magnets used to accelerate sub-atomic particles around the machine's 17-mile underground tunnel had to be cleaned or repaired. At the time, the repair costs for the LHC were expected to be as much as £11m.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, the organisation that built the LHC, announced on Monday that it expects the first beams to begin in September, with the first collisions expected by late October.
The delay is the latest in a string of restart dates Cern has announced. Cern had originally expected to have the LHC back online at the beginning of April, following Cern's annual maintenance period. But that target was revised last November to June. Later that month, Cern's head of communications, James Gillies, told ZDNet UK that the new plan was to restart the LHC in late summer.
"The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data," Cern director general Rolf Heuer said in a statement. "It is cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year."
The LHC, located along the French-Swiss border, is designed to smash beams of protons into each other, test fundamental physics theories, and help understand the nature of matter.
Talkback
While I always applaud the inquisitive scientific mind, I do wonder if we may be going a bit overboard with this grossly expensive machine. Even if it does eventually function successfully and we get the particles colliding, if it does not cause the earth to explode then I fail to see what practical value it will possibly have to mankind (particularly this small element of us who are funding the astronomical costs.
Yeah, its worth asking the question, but remember people though space exploration was a big waste of money too. As it turned out the technologies developed are used all over the place now.
LHC is not just about physics. Its the biggest distributed number cruncher too. Building such a thing will help our methodology on building other super computers.
Also don't forget the materials developed, such as the magnets, are also on a new scale to anything we have previously done. You might find some of these technologies getting used elsewhere, such as MRI machines.
A big engineering problem is good for engineering in general.
But even that aside, I think a large point of being human is to discover. There's more to life than money.