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Large Hadron Collider down for 2 months due to hot magnets

The world's largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month, is more badly damaged than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday. Experts have gone into the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its September 10 startup and now the collider has to be warmed up to be repaired.

Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so repairs can be made, a time-consuming process. "A number of magnets raised their temperature by around 100 degrees," Gillies said. "We have now to warm up the whole sector in a controlled manner before we can actually go in and repair it." The $10 billion particle collider, in the design and construction stages for more than two decades, is the world's largest atom smasher. It fires beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms around the tunnels at nearly the speed of light.

CNN

Posted by | Mon, Sep 22, 2008 - 08:18 AM