Scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva are facing mixed emotions as they see themselves forced to put on hold their plans to fire up the Big Bang machine. According to a CERN report, during commissioning of the final Large Hadron Collider sector for operation at 5 TeV, an incident occurring mid-day on September 19 resulted in a large helium leak into the tunnel.

According to preliminary investigations, the cause may have been a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which they assumed melted at high current, leading to the mechanical failure.

According to CERN, their “strict safety regulations ensured that at no time was there any risk to people.” However, with a more detailed investigation on the way, the plans to collide two beams in the LHC machine will probably be postponed for a minimum of two months.

“For the same fault, not uncommon in a normally conducting machine, the repair time would be a matter of days,” CERN explained. However, this is a much more complex situation, and everything needs to be perfect before they attempt the most important experiment in our history.

The LHC accelerator is capable of producing beams seven times more energetic than any other similar machine, and the beams are expected to reach their maximum intensity (30 times greater) by 2010, when the machine will reach maximum design performance.

“The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator on Earth,” CERN Director General Robert Aymar explained at a meeting held in Geneva in June this year, “but the Universe has far more powerful ones. The LHC will enable us to study in detail under laboratory conditions what nature is doing already.”