The 17-mile-long machine was built underground in the France-Switzerland border. The transformer connections were damaged.
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He is quite optimistic that they will be back soon and that too with an exciting scientific programme at the LHC.
NPR reports that the largest and most powerful particle accelerator on the planet has been decommissioned by a weasel. Nicknamed the “God particle” by some, it is believed to explain how other particles get their mass. The finding led Peter Higgs and Francois Englert to win the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.
Mysterious particles such as pentaquarks, gravitons and dark matter may be waiting to be discovered.
The little critter gnawed through a 66-kilovolt transformer inside an electrical facility outside the main building. In February 2016, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider managed to recreate the beginning of the universe, and therefore observe quarks and gluons in the brief moments following the Big Bang.
Fast forward to this week and yet another animal has knocked the LHC offline, but this time it was a ground assault instead of an attack from above. In that case the bird survived, but the collider had to be shut down briefly.
As part of the rodent family, weasels and their ilk love to chew and explore.
Arnaud Marsollier, a spokesperson for CERN, the company that run the collider, said: ‘We had electrical problems, and we are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal’. The damage will only take a few days to fix, but getting the machine back up to full operation could take weeks. The cause was a baguette that caught inside the piece of equipment supporting the machine and was probably dropped by a bird. But, he tells New Scientist, the equipment is fine and the fix should be easy. “We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere”.
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The incident comes just a month after the atom smasher begin revealing physics data for the first time in 27 months after a two-year period of shutdown and re-commissioning.
