The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, will see no collisions until late October, more than a year after its planned start date.
Officials from CERN, the LHC's host laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, had hoped to restart the machine by summer 2009, after it was seriously damaged during power tests last September. But on 9 February CERN announced a further delay, citing additional safety protocols and complex repair schedules as the reasons.
With a short technical stop over Christmas, the LHC will run through to autumn 2010, but it will accelerate its protons to just 5 teraelectronvolts (TeV), well below its designed 7 TeV. Pauline Gagnon, an experimental physicist with ATLAS, one of the LHC's detectors, thinks that at the reduced power "the chances of finding something will be limited", but that the LHC might still see some new physics.
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Safety precautions delay start-up of hadron collider. Nature 457, 949 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/457949d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/457949d
