Electrical
fault corrected, 'Big Bang' collider to restart soon
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[April 01, 2015]
GENEVA (Reuters) - CERN engineers
said on Tuesday they have resolved a problem that had delayed the
relaunch after a two-year refit of the Large Hadron Collider particle
smasher, which is probing the mysteries of the universe.
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A statement from the research center just outside Geneva said a
metal fragment that caused an intermittent short circuit in one of
the giant magnets in the vast underground complex had been
successfully removed.
The relaunch of the so-called 'Big Bang' machine had to be postponed
last week because of the problem.
CERN said that after new tests on all the circuits in the area where
the fault appeared, the way would be clear for proton particles to
be sent in opposite directions right around the machine's
27-kilometre underground tubes.
This could happen "in a few days", the statement said.
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However, proton particle collisions at twice the power of the first
runs, which brought the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson,
will not begin until May, physicists say.
These collisions, at almost the speed of light, create the chaotic
conditions inside the LHC close to those that followed the Big Bang
13.8 billion years ago, from which the universe eventually emerged.
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The product of the collisions is captured in the collider's giant
detectors and is analyzed by scientists at CERN and around the world
for signs of new information about the cosmos and how it works at
the elementary particle level.
Among the aims of scientists at the revamped LHC is to establish the
existence of the unseen dark matter that makes up around 96 per cent
of the stuff of the universe, but has only been detected through its
influence on visible objects.
(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Crispian Balmer)
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