LHC relaunch put off to November

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, has been delayed to mid-November.

James Gillies, the head of communications for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), said no specific date had been set but added that a number of tests to gauge the LHC’s functionality had concluded.

“The closer we get, the more solid it becomes,” he told swissinfo.ch. “It looks like now, the coast is pretty clear.”

Cern will continue performing tests to determine at what energy level they can run the LHC. The particle accelerator’s technicians will meet this week with scientists to determine the strategy for this year and next, Gillies said on Tuesday.

Cern has allocated an addition SFr13 million ($12.2 million) to the LHC’s operating budget. Gillies said this money came directly from Cern, not from the member states funding the project.

The particle accelerator, buried underground and spanning the Swiss-French border, suffered an electrical failure a few days after its launch last September.

In its official bulletin, published on Friday, Cern said that liquid helium leaks probably caused the latest problem.

Cern has nearly finished examining the 10,000 electrical interconnections like the one that failed in September. Originally, the organisation said it expected to start test collisions in April but that date has been pushed back several times already, most recently to October.

“Decisions will be taken as to whether there are more [electrical interconnections] that need repairing or not within the next couple of weeks, and when we know that, we will be in a position to be a little bit more definitive about what we plan to do for the rest of the year,” Gillies said.

Scientists hope the LHC will allow them to recreate the conditions one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and to better understand the origins of the universe.

swissinfo.ch and agencies