CERN

The Large Hadron Collider, currently undergoing repairs, will change its schedule and run through the winter to make sure the experiment provides workable results.

The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) flagship particle accelerator has been out of action since September, when an electrical fault called a halt to an experiment to understand the fundamental physics of matter. It is scheduled to restart in September 2009.

On Wednesday, James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the LHC could carry on running over the subsequent months. Normally, CERN particle-acceleration operations cease in November for the winter, because energy costs throughout … Read more

The final replacement magnet for the Large Hadron Collider has been lowered into the giant particle accelerator's tunnel.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on Thursday the completion of the LHC's above-ground repair work. Work is still going on below ground to connect the 53 reinstalled magnets, which are used in the scientific project to guide particles around a 17-mile tunnel under the Alps. The LHC fires two high-speed particles streams around the tunnel in opposite directions, smashing them together at certain points in order to learn more about scientific mysteries such as the nature of … Read more

The Big Bang was supposed to have happened last year.

Then the Large Hadron Collider blew a fuse that had been wired by a couple of teenagers from Turkmenistan (I'm kidding. They were actually from the backstreets of Vilnius.) and had to be shut down for major repairs.

Meanwhile, it seems, physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have been tinkering with their Tevatron.

The Tevatron doesn't have the scale of the Large Hadron Collider. But it does seem to have one small advantage: it's actually working. Yes, those beams of protons are smashing … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider could be restarted at the end of September--a year after the world's largest particle accelerator was knocked off line by an electrical malfunction.

LHC operations were suspended last September after a transformer malfunction in its cooling system allowed a helium leak--just nine days after the controversial project became operational. An investigation concluded that the malfunction was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets.

As a result, the 53 magnets used to accelerate sub-atomic particles around the machine's 17-mile underground tunnel had to be cleaned or repaired. At the … Read more

On Friday, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) released photos of damage to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's flagship particle accelerator. The particle accelerator was damaged by a liquid helium leak in September, nine days into an experiment to test fundamental theories of physics by colliding beams of protons inside a 17-mile ring.

Picture 1, above, shows two of the most severely broken interconnects, which are between the magnets in LHC sectors three and four. The superconducting magnets, used to direct and focus the proton beams in the experiment, are cooled by liquid helium. An electrical fault caused … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider will come back online in late summer 2009 at the earliest, and not in June as previously expected.

The LHC was shut down in September, nine days after it was first fully powered up, following a helium leak caused by an electrical fault. The world's most powerful particle accelerator is designed to smash beams of protons into each other, test fundamental physics theories, and help understand the nature of matter.

The machine is located at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), where it straddles the Swiss-French border.

CERN director Robert Aymar said in October … Read more

The world's most powerful particle accelerator will go live again in June at the earliest, after a shutdown in September.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the Large Hadron Collider, previously suggested that the apparatus would be restarted in April, following maintenance. On Monday, however, it emerged that June would be the earliest possible date for operations to resume fully. It also became apparent that the cost of the repairs alone could be as high as $16 million.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel nestled beneath the Swiss-French border in the Alps. It … Read more

Few CIOs could claim to have helped recreate the Big Bang at work.

But as head of IT at CERN, Wolfgang von Rueden plays a key role in the nuclear research lab's quest to unravel the nature of the universe by colliding particles at 99 percent the speed of light.

Von Rueden and his team provide the computing backbone that supports the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator's hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson--dubbed the "God particle"--invisible dark matter, and even evidence of extra dimensions.

Having joined the lab in Geneva in 1975, von Rueden … Read more

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes … Read more