Large Hadron Collider restart "back on track"
After nearly two years in dormancy, the world's largest particle smasher was set to be turned back on in March, but a short circuit added a little extra wait time.
Now, engineers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, say plans are back on track.
On Monday, teams resolved an intermittent short circuit in one of the connections between a magnet and its diode. When they first discovered it, scientists called it a "well understood issue," but said it would take time to correct because the short occurred in a cold section of the machine, which needed to be warmed up before it could be fixed, then cooled again before it could be used.
The LHC's electromagnets are chilled to ‑271.3 degrees C, a temperature colder than outer space.
Now that the problem has been fixed, the teams must carry out current tests on all of the circuits before beginning the last steps for commissioning the whole machine. A statement from CERN said, "The largest collider in the world should be ready for beam in a few days' time."
Thursday, Frédérick Bordry, director for accelerators and technology at CERN, updated his guidance, saying that all tests have been successful and he is "confident" they'll be able to restart the machine over the weekend.
The LHC identified the Higgs boson, aka the "God particle," in July 2012, an important step toward understanding the origin of mass. It was then turned off in early 2013 and put through a series of upgrades. When the collider is restarted, it will be cranked up to nearly full power, 13 trillion electrovolts, almost double the power of the first run, to search for dark matter, dark energy and evidence of supersymmetry.