A scientist works in the CERN LHC computing grid centre in Geneva, October 3, 2008. This centre is one of the 140 data processing centres, located in 33 countries, taking part in the grid processing project. More than 15 million Gigabytes of data produced from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) should be collected every year. (Valentin Flauraud/Reuters)From Yahoo News/AP:
GENEVA - A bad electrical connection likely caused the malfunction that sidelined the world's largest atom smasher days after it was launched with great fanfare, a senior scientist said Monday.
The fault was probably a poor soldering job on one of the particle collider's 10,000 connections, said Lyn Evans, project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organization.
Only one fault in 10,000 isn't bad, "but it cost dearly," Evans said. It will take at least two months for the repair, meaning the collider cannot be restarted until spring, after its mandatory shutdown due to high electricity costs during the winter.
Evans said he still hasn't been able to examine the damage because the collider is too cold to be opened. The machine operates at extremely cold temperatures to take advantage of superconductivity — the ability of some metals to conduct electricity without any resistance near absolute zero degrees.
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