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LHC to Shut Down for a Year to Address Design Faults
from BBC News Online
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director. Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years. The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts.
But joints between the machine's magnets must be strengthened before higher-energy collisions can commence. The Geneva-based machine only recently restarted after being out of action for 14 months following an accident in September 2008.
Dr Myers said: "It's something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error." He said: "The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits."
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