The Hindu : Front Page : Bird drops baguette into Hadron Collider

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Monday, Nov 09, 2009
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Bird drops baguette into Hadron Collider

Adam Gabbatt

It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time. But scientists at the £3.6-billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the Big Bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a “bit of baguette” into the machine, causing it to overheat.

CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, launched the LHC with much fanfare on September 10 last.

Physicists hope to use the collider to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.

But the collider, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99. per cent of the speed of light, has been out of action for over a year after a helium leak caused it to be shut down on September 19, 2008, nine days after its start-up. The particle accelerator, which is buried 100 metres underground near Geneva, is undergoing tests ahead of its proposed restart date later this month, but the testing process was stopped on Monday after power supply to the collider was cut.

A CERN spokeswoman, Christine Sutton, said scientists had headed above ground to investigate when they made their discovery. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009

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