The world's single most complicated and expensive scientific experiment, designed to discover the "God particle" and recreate the conditions that existed at the dawn of creation, will be switched off for a year to correct a design problem that could break it apart if it ran on full power.
Scientists in charge of the Large Hadron Collider LHC in Geneva announced yesterday that the machine will only be able to run on half energy before it is temporarily shut down in two years' time.
Its full operating capacity designed to probe the frontiers of science will not be achieved until at least — several years later than planned. On 19 September , the LHC had to be shut down just days after it was switched on for the first time because of an electrical fault that led to helium gas being accidentally released into the machine's underground tunnel.
It is just that some of the copper stabilisers are not up to the quality needed to go to the full energy level," said Steve Myers, director of accelerators and technology at Cern. As a compromise to the particle physicists eager to begin work on the fundamental forces of nature at the heart of the atomic nucleus, the Cern authorities decided to run the machine on half energy for the next two years in the hope that this would provide enough experimental data for them to begin to make discoveries in esoteric fields such as supersymmetry and dark matter.
However, the revelation that the problems at the LHC are going to delay its full potential for several more years is unlikely to soothe the growing discontent among scientists in other disciplines who feel that "big physics" gets more than its fair share of funding, especially when savage spending cuts are being planned in other areas of science back home. Even nuclear physicists are beginning to feel envious of the funding given to their colleagues in particle physics.
