The much-awaited relaunch of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been postponed for several weeks due to a short circuit in the wiring of one of the central magnets.
Engineers at Europe's CERN are aiming to restart smashing protons on Wednesday after two years of refitting the machine so that it can smash particles using twice the power it previously had. Scientists decided to double the power of LHC so that it can remake the Big Bang for further understanding the birth of the universe. However, everyone got disappointed when the engineers detected an intermittent short circuit on one of the eight sectors of the 27-km underground tube, according to Reuters.
The researchers are back to fixing the wiring issues of the LHC and trying to warm up the cold section of the machine that caused the problem.
"Current indications suggest a delay of between a few days and several weeks," CERN director Rolf Heuer said in a statement.
"All the signs are good for a great run 2. In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks delay in humankind's quest to understand our universe is little more than the blink of an eye," he added.
The engineers are positive that the weeks of delay will pay off once they start the second run so they are not planning to rush in fixing the machine. The second run is expected to provide more understanding on dark matter, the Higgs Boson and the New Physics.
Scientists who have been waiting for the world's largest and most powerful particle collider to date, on the other hand, are willing to wait until it is fully operational. They plan to spend the waiting time in improving their own computer models for data analysis.
"It's a very separate organization, basically," Particle physicist Jonathan Butterworth from the University College London told BBC News. "The accelerator guys are all within Cern - and we're sort of ready and waiting. We do what they tell us at this stage."
