Published on ShanghaiDaily.com (http://www.shanghaidaily.com/)
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2008/200811/20081118/article_381052.htm
Big Bang atom smasher repairs extend
Created: 2008-11-18 4:15:04
FIXING the world's largest atom smasher would cost at least 25 million francs (US$21 million) and may take until early summer, its operator said yesterday.
An electrical failure shut down the Large Hadron Collider on September 19, nine days after the US$10 billion machine started up with great fanfare.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research recently said that the repairs would be completed by May or early June. Spokesman James Gillies said the organization know as CERN was now estimating the restart would be at the end of June or later.
"If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer," he said.
The organization has blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection.
The atom smasher operates at temperatures colder than outer space to get maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to better assess it, he said.
"Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections," Gillies said. The cost of the work would fall within the organization's existing budget, according to Gillies.
The massive machine on the Swiss-French border was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms together at high energy and record what particles were produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the smallest components of matter.
It would show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe.
The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing rapidly.
An electrical failure shut down the Large Hadron Collider on September 19, nine days after the US$10 billion machine started up with great fanfare.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research recently said that the repairs would be completed by May or early June. Spokesman James Gillies said the organization know as CERN was now estimating the restart would be at the end of June or later.
"If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer," he said.
The organization has blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection.
The atom smasher operates at temperatures colder than outer space to get maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to better assess it, he said.
"Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections," Gillies said. The cost of the work would fall within the organization's existing budget, according to Gillies.
The massive machine on the Swiss-French border was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms together at high energy and record what particles were produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the smallest components of matter.
It would show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe.
The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing rapidly.
Agencies
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