Major repair work on 'Big Bang' machine completed
Engineers have finished the major work of fixing the broken “Big Bang” machine, the largest scientific instrument ever built.
The last of 53 replacement magnets for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been lowered into the 16-mile tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border which houses the machine.
Scientists said they were on track to re-start the particle accelerator in the autumn.
The LHC, based at the Swiss headquarters of the European nuclear research organisation Cern, was switched on in September last year amid a fanfare of publicity.
But just 10 days later an electrical fault led to a catastrophic leak of helium used to cool the machine’s powerful magnets, causing a complete shut-down.
The LHC is designed to collide sub-atomic particles together at energies never before attained.
It will re-create the conditions moments after the Big Bang which gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
A key aim of the LHC is to find the elusive Higgs Boson – nicknamed the “God Particle” – which is believed by theoretical physicists to explain the existence of mass.
There is also a chance of the machine creating tiny short-lived black holes, a fact which led to some wild speculation about the Earth being doomed by out-of-control experiments.
The super-cooled magnets are used to drive the particles around the LHC’s ring-shaped tunnel.
In total, 53 magnets had to be removed from two sections of the tunnel. Sixteen that suffered minimal damage were refurbished. The remaining 37 were replaced by spares, and will themselves be repaired to provide a back-up supply in case of future break-downs.
Announcing that the last of the magnets had been moved underground, Steve Myers, Cern’s director for accelerators and technology, said: “This is an important milestone in the repair process. It gets us close to where we were before the incident, and allows us to concentrate our efforts on installing the systems that will ensure a similar incident won’t happen again.”
With all the magnets now in place, work will focus on reconnecting them and installing new safety systems.
Extra pressure relief valves are to be fitted to ensure the safe and controlled release of helium in the event of any further leaks.
