Bill for atom smasher around €16.5m

The repair bill for Europe’s giant atom smasher which broke down shortly after being switched on for the first time will be around €16.5m, scientists said today.

An electrical failure shut down the Large Hadron Collider on September 19, nine days after the €8bn machine’s much-heralded start up.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research recently said that the repairs would be completed by May or early June.

A spokesman said the organisation known as Cern is now estimating the restart will be at the end of June or later.

“If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer,” he said.

The organisation has blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection.

The atom smasher operates at temperatures colder than outer space to get maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to better assess it, he said.

“Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections,” he said.

The massive machine on the Swiss-French border was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms together at high energy and record what particles are produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the smallest components of matter.

That will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorise was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing rapidly.

Scientists have taken the setback in their stride, saying that particle colliders always have such problems in the start-up phase.