Date published: 2008/09/22
The BBC says:
The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be out of action for at least two months, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) says.
Part of the giant physics experiment was turned off for the weekend while engineers probed a magnet failure.
But a Cern spokesman said damage to the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator was worse than anticipated.
...
On Friday, a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees.The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.
A quench is one of the worst things that could have happened, but given how many magnets there are and how complicated the entire collider is, it's not entirely surprising that one occurred. It will mean that lots of Ph.D. students and others are fretting about the delay to their experiments.
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