GENEVA Scientists are restarting a giant sub-atomic particle collider built to reproduce “Big Bang” conditions, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) said on Friday.
After a year’s delay, they hope to have beams circulating by early Saturday in the huge tunnels under the French-Swiss border that are part of the world’s biggest machine, and then accelerate them this weekend, Cern spokesman James Gillies said.
“At the moment they’re putting beams down in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and as the night goes on they’ll take the beams through and start circulating them,” he said.
The experiment will not be properly under way until January when the LHC is operating at full capacity, he said.
Technical problems forced Cern to shut down the $9.82 billion collider just nine days after it was started for the first time in September 2008.
The problem was a faulty splice in the super-conducting cable connecting two cooling magnets in the 27-km underground ring, which smashes particles at a temperature of just above absolute zero to recreate conditions believed to exist at the start of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Reuters
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