The large Hadron Collider is facing a delay after the team spotted a short circuit within its large electromagnets. The LHC was supposed to start colliding protons together at higher velocities but the LHC is now facing a delay of several weeks, The LHC already took a break of two years.
It was expected this week that the LHC would be testing proton beams to travel safely in the 27 Km Tubes but now the short circuit has moved the plan forward.
According to Cern, this short circuit was detected on Saturday and has damaged one of the magnets which are responsible for carrying the protons around the LHC. This area is called sector 3-4 of the machine. Cern says that this might be a bigger problem than they had anticipated and could hamper the project starting date; they also said that the issue is being solved and is well understood. The problem is that magnets need to be super cooled to a temperature of -273C so the repair will take a lot of time.
Cern announced on Tuesday is the magnet remains faulty and needs to be warmed and re-cooled than the process may take several weeks. Cryogenic machines always take time because it takes a lot of time to warm up.
Researchers at Cern believe that they are still on time and will make sure that the world’s largest machine will start running soon. Scientists are excited to see the machine running as the machine may answer a lot of questions to understand our universe.