HONG KONG: A short circuit detected in the wiring of one of the powerful electromagnets of the Large Hadron Collider could delay its much-awaited relaunch by days or even weeks.
The LHC has been shut down for repairs and maintenance for past two years and has been rewired and thoroughly checked during the closedown. During this period, the LHC has been upgraded to a new power level, from 8 TeV to 13 TeV. This makes the collider capable of smashing protons with higher energies- at 6.5 TeV per beam, instead of 4 TeV.
The 27 km long underground tunnel allows proton beams to travel safely in both directions when collisions start. CERN said that seven of the collider’s eight sectors had been successfully commissioned to run at the higher operating energy of 6.5 TeV (trillion electron volts) per beam, but the eighth was still under investigation.
CERN, the European nuclear research organization which runs the LHC, said that the “intermittent short circuit” was discovered on Saturday. The repair is estimated to take a long time because the magnets need to be super cooled to temperatures nearing to absolute zero (-273C). CERN said it was “a well understood issue”. As the short circuit is in a cold section of the LCH, the repair will need warming up and then cooling down of the collider.
In 2012, CERN scientists discovered a new subatomic particle which is the basic building block of our universe. Called Higgs Boson, the new subatomic particle seemed to be the boson that was theorized by renowned physicist Peter Higgs.
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