2011: LHC accelerator will stop operating for 1 year

At the end of 2011, the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), will be temporarily shut down for a year to fix technical problems in the process of making this giant device.

Technical errors will prevent the accelerator from reaching a maximum energy of 14 TeV within the next 2 years.Photo: Telegraph.

Dr Steve Myers, Director of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which owns the LHC accelerator, said the device will be shut down for repair by the end of 2011.

The LHC accelerator is expected to reach world record energy later this month with 7 TeV proton beams in scientists' efforts to recreate the Big Bang. However, Dr. Myers said that technical errors will prevent the accelerator from reaching a maximum energy of 14 TeV within the next 2 years.

The LHC accelerator began operating in September 2008, but only 9 days after its operation, the £ 5 billion machine had a problem due to an unstable electrical connection system. Consequently, 53 out of 1,624 giant magnets (length of about 15m) of this machine were broken and had to be replaced.

Later in September 2009, the LHC accelerator continued to encounter another problem caused by a piece of bread dropped by a bird on its exposed part. This has caused superconducting magnets to overheat over 1.90K (to about 80K), near the limit that magnets stop superconducting.

LHC is a giant machine with a circumference of 27km, at a depth of 100m underground near Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of this particle accelerator is to detect Higg particles, which are considered to be the smallest matter particles and antimatter particles.