The Large Hadron Collider “on sleep” until spring 2009

The incident at The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, on 19 September resulted in a large leaking of a tonne of liquid helium into the experiment’s 27km-long tunnel.
“Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow,” (Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern)).

A spokesman for Cern stated that it is unclear at this point when the collider could  be re-started after the lab’s regular winter shut-down - which is partly done to save money on electricity during this period of peak demand.
“It’s usually around late March or early April that we start re-commissioning the whole accelerator chain. The LHC being at the end of that chain,” ( James Gillies, Cern’s director of communications).
“It will take us a while to get beams injected into the LHC, but I think it’s fair to say this will be the priority for next year’s start-up.”

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