LHC particle accelerator will shut down for a year in 2011

The Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator near Geneva, will be shut down for a year at the end of 2011 for maintenance. CERN is said to have discovered construction flaws, which must be rectified before it can run at full power.

The particle accelerator is currently in operation and CERN, the European center for atomic research, hopes the LHC will set another world record by the end of this month by breaking the 7TeV mark. However, scientists have found that the connections between the magnets must be strengthened before the power can be increased further. The copper jackets of the superconducting magnets, which are supposed to absorb the current charges if a magnet gets too hot, would not withstand acceleration of particles to more than 7 TeV.

In order to be able to carry out the necessary repairs, the particle accelerator will be completely shut down at the end of 2011 for at least a year. Until then, the LHC will run at half power. If the repairs are successful, the particle accelerator could operate at maximum power during 2012. Maintenance is also used to check various other systems.

CERN CEO Steve Myers told the BBC know that the magnetic connection problem could have been discovered and resolved at an earlier stage if more people and resources had been made available. According to him, however, it is not a fundamental design flaw: “You only build one example of a device like the LHC and you only do it once. You don’t hear anyone about the many things that do go well.”

The LHC was put into service on September 10, 2008, but has faced several problems since then. However, CERN overcame a hurdle on Wednesday: A woman’s claim at the German constitutional court to shut down the LHC was rejected. According to the judges, it has not been proven that dangerous black holes can be formed by colliding protons at high speed. A similar case took place in the United States.