Officials have confirmed that the much-anticipated ‘Big Bang’ stage of the Large Hadron Collider project won’t take place this year. As feared, repairs to fix a helium leak won’t be finished before the collider shuts down for the winter to save on power costs.

As we reported last week, the project was briefly delayed with both electrical problems and the irritations of hackers tampering with the system’s computers. Those problems were a stumbling block, but not a major problem.

However, staff then discovered one of the electrical connections between the magnets which steer the particles around the collider had melted. This caused a leak of helium which naturally had to be fixed before the project could reach its money shot: colliding particles at a fraction less than the speed of light to simulate the universe’s condition a moment after its creation in the Big Bang.

The problem is that the section of the collider affected by the leak has to operate at minus 271 degrees Celsius to get the necessary strength from the magnets. Engineers said it could take a couple of months to heat the section up enough that they could fix the leak, then cool it down to the original temperature.

There’s no room for error here: if the magnets don’t work to optimal capacity, there’s a danger the protons could crash into the walls of the collider, which would create a big bang of a very different kind.

Despite initial hopes, it’s now clear the repairs will take too long to get up and running again before a scheduled shutdown for the winter: it seems even a $5 billion plus operation finds winter electricity costs a burden. It now looks as if it will be the end of March before the switches get turned on again – though as officials have pointed out, it’s only a minor delay given the project is already 20 years old.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 4:37 pm under Science and technology.

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