SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Collider to Operate Again, Though at Half Power
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally be going into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider was built over 15 years and at a cost of $10 billion to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts apiece and then bang them together in a search for primordial forces and new laws of physics. But the machine has been plagued with problems.
In the fall of 2008, after the collider was first turned on, an electrical splice between two of the superconducting magnets that guide the proton beams exploded during a test, casting doubt on the integrity of thousands of such splices in the collider, which is 18 miles around.
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