On 18 November, the LHC was handed over for operation. Teams are now preparing for injecting and circulating the first beams of 2009.


The LHC tunnel. Illustration shows the beampipes inside a dipole magnet.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has said it's ready to restart the machine scientists hope will recreate the conditions that led to the big bang.


A bird and a piece of bread kept the LHC switched off longer than expected

If all goes well, CERN researchers will restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Saturday morning, sending a beam of protons around the 27-kilometer (18-mile) underground, circular tunnel housing the machine for the first time since September 2008.

Back then, a bad electrical connection cut short the $10 billion (6.7 billion euro) machine's debut, exposing shortcomings in its design and construction.

Over the past year, engineers at CERN's laboratory, located on near Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France, have been repairing about 200 electrical connections and 53 superconducting magnets. They've also installed an early warning system which should help prevent incidents of the type which shut down the experiment.


What proton collision looks like. Will researchers find the "God particle?"

The purpose of the experiment is to replicate conditions at the time of the "big bang," in other words, the beginning of the universe. Physicists hope to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, also known as "the God particle." It's this particle which supposedly gives matter in the universe its mass.

To create such conditions, the LHC has to generate collisions between protons travelling at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. In its first few months of operation, the machine will collide protons at energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV), but it was designed to run at energies of seven TeV.

Baguette-eating bird causes short circuit

Attempts to restart the collider suffered an initial setback this month, when a bird picking at a piece of baguette caused a short circuit at one of the points where the electricity supply from the grid enters the collider from above ground.

"The problem related to the high voltage supply," CERN spokeswoman Christine Sutton said at the time. "We get mains voltage from the grid, and there was an interruption in the power supply, just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread."

The system was restored several hours later, but the "baguette incident" again showed just how susceptible the massive machine, which took 20 years to build, is to interruptions.

Accordingly, researchers at CERN have been keeping the fanfare about the re-launch of the LHC to a minimum.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4911429,00.html

Good question! I think NOT!



Aren't birds the real angels of God?

Doh no wonder the birds drop stuff in there the sides are open. Be cockroaches next week.

http://twitter.com/BreakingNews/status/5892651277

£50 says a penguin sticks a turnip on the cooling coils.

Maybe a bats shite will corrode the bare wire between the control and the action.

BANG!!!! Shut down.

Maybe it's been running for a while, and they are just figuring out how to control what they've let happen?

I predict success. Good things will come from this, you just watch

There are many reasons, many people do not want this to succeed.

Maybe an over exposure of pigeon shit will lock up a gear or two!

hahaha!

I can't believe it is so unsecure a bird eating bread really f'd it up.

Sounds like a Eucharist moment to me!

smells like bullshit to me

blame the bird

sounds like the same thing that happened when the dudes who built hubble couldn't decide if they were using metric or imperial measurements.

some one fucked up something major in the design...and the best that they could cum up with is a fukin hungry bird (notice the subliminal blaming of the French at the same time(it was a baguette not bread))

i guess scientists should stick to science and let the creation of fiction to the writers.

i am sure that i could have come up with a way better story than a French bird with an eating disorder and suicidal tendencies.

I dont think you can write off the power of a piece of dried baguette dropped strategically from a height.
Seems this experiment has been somewhat plagued to date though.