The European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider will not be online again until the next spring. CERN announced September 23 that, due to existing plans not to run the LHC during the winter because of fuel costs, the particle accelerator will not be powered up before next year's spring even though repairs could be finished earlier. The LHC was scheduled for shutdown in December for four months to save money.

A faulty electrical connection between two magnets melted, led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out. Warming up the whole damaged section so that it can be worked on will take a while, as well as cooling it back down. In addition, extensive repairs will be needed on that part of the LHC, but they do not pose technical problems.

CERN Director General Robert Aymar said in a statement that the months-long delay "is undoubtedly a psychological blow." "Nevertheless … I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application," Aymar says.

An inauguration ceremony scheduled for October 21, which was to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, among other officials, will now be delayed.

The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider and its highly sensitive detectors are effectively the world's most advanced particle physics experiment, which is also backed by some mega-powerful computer clusters all around the world to process the large amounts of data extracted from the detectors.

The powerful machine was designed to offer scientists an inside view at an explosion very similar to the one that caused the so-called ‘big bang’ phenomenon – a theory about a massive explosion responsible for the formation of the stars, the planets and everything else found in the Universe.

The experiment will be possible by using a series of magnetic accelerators to take beams of protons to up to 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) and collide them together all across the machine’s 27 kilometers.

The project will look for signs of the Higgs particle, which is believed by some scientists to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. CERN said in its statement that its entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels.