The fault that has shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be hugely disappointing for scientists and engineers following the successful ‘start-up’ of the experiment. It is now over a week since the first beams were fired around the accelerator’s 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring. The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. But hopes that the first trial collisions would be carried out before the machine’s official inauguration on 21 October now seem to have been dashed. It even looks uncertain whether this can be achieved before 2009. The failure on 19 September – described as a ‘massive’ magnet quench – certainly seems dramatic: it caused the temperatures in about 100 of the LHC’s super-cooled magnets to soar by as much as 100C. The fire brigade had to be called after a tonne of liquid helium leaked out into the LHC tunnel. If you keep an eye on the big picture, we’ve been building the machine for 20 years James Gillies Cern’s director of communications One of the LHC’s eight sectors will now have to be warmed up to well above its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) […]