The LHC was supposed to restart later this month following a 2-year break for maintenance and upgrades

Mar 26, 2015 10:10 GMT  ·  By

Towards the end of last week, on March 21, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, for short), which is currently the absolute largest particle smasher anywhere in the world, threw a fit and ended up developing a short circuit.

The problem is yet to be resolved. Thus, the short circuit, understood to be an intermittent one, is still crippling the mammoth underground machinery, keeping it from working properly.

“An intermittent short circuit to ground in one of the machine’s magnet circuits was identified on 21 March and is under investigation,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) wrote in a recent statement.

This is yet to be confirmed, but there are suspicions that what is plaguing the LHC is a small piece of debris that got stuck inside it while the machinery was undergoing maintenance and upgrading.

First things first, here's how the LHC works

The LHC, shaped like a circular pipe with a circumference of 27 kilometers (approximately 16.8 miles), lies buried 100 meters (328 feet) in the underground beneath the Franco-Swiss border, not far from the city of Geneva in Switzerland.

It uses freakishly powerful magnets to accelerate beams of protons to a speed comparable to that of light and then get them to collide with one another. The collisions break the protons apart, and from the resulting debris, new particles are born.

The newly formed particles are tracked down with the help of sophisticated instruments best described as hypersensitive microscopes. Such experiments allow scientists to gain a better understanding of the makeup of the universe.

A few years back, in 2012, the LHC helped researchers zoom in on the Higgs boson, an elementary particle argued to give all the other particles mass. In the years to come, the machinery is expected to shed new light on dark matter and dark energy.

Revealing the nature of antimatter and figuring out how elementary particles are created are also on the agenda, as is trying to zoom in on the properties of the Higgs boson and the so-called Higgs field this particle is associated with.

Last week's short circuit was not such a big surprise

In 2013, the year following the discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC was put in time-up for maintenance and upgrading. More precisely, scientists replaced some components and added new ones so as to double the energy levels the machinery can reach.

This work involved a lot of cutting and welding and is believed to have inadvertently caused last week's short circuit by producing the piece of debris now keeping one of the LHC's magnets from firing up. Interestingly enough, CERN scientists aren't even mad about this incident.

“A small metallic object is sitting in what we call the diode box. It’s unavoidable to have small bits of metallic debris in the circuits,” physicist Lyn Evans, who helped design and build the LHC, told the press in an interview, as cited by Nature.

The LHC was scheduled to restart for a second run by the end of this month. Presently, it is unclear whether the short circuit will delay the much-expected restart for just a few days or if maybe it will be months before the machinery is once again up and running.

The LHC is shaped like a circular pipe
The LHC is shaped like a circular pipe

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Short circuit delays restart of the LHC
The LHC is shaped like a circular pipe
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