The CERN Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has been temporarily shut down after a weasel caused a “severe electrical perturbation” in the early hours of Friday ( 29 April) morning. The attacker apparently was chewing on 66,000-volt electrical cables connected to a transformer the powered the LHC and caused a shortage.
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Spokesman Arnaud Marsollier said the world’s largest atom smasher, the LHC, has suspended operations because the animal invaded a transformer that helps power the machine and set off an electrical outage on Thursday night.
Arnaud Marsollier told the BBC that it would take a few days to fix the damage caused by the weasel’s visit.
“Not the best week for the LHC!” the document reads.
It only took one small animal to bring down the world’s most powerful scientific instrument.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is perhaps most famous for being used in 2012 in detecting experimental evidence for the Higgs boson particle, or so-called “God Particle”.
Elsewhere in 2006, raccoons attacked a particle accelerator in IL.
The large hadron collider (LHC) is a 27km circuit which runs under the Swiss-French border.
Friday’s incident came at an unfortunate time.
“We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere”, Marsollier said, noting that it is not uncommon to encounter these situations.
Keeping that in mind, CERN has chose to release 300 TB (terabyte) of data from its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for free use on the Internet, according to an article tweeted by theoretical physicist Sean M Carroll. In 2009, for example, a bird is suspected of dropping a piece of bread into the machine, causing a brief stoppage then. Had we been running, we’d have lost a day or two’s worth of beam time, which is nothing unusual when operating a frontier research machine like the LHC.
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While CERN’s own thorough report on the incident says it plans to “resume physics” as soon as repairs are made, it also shares that this is, “Not the best week for LHC!”
