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The Large Hadron Collider is ready to start smashing its first particles together early next week, after glitches with the £3.6 billion “big bang machine” were fixed by engineers.

Although scientists had hoped that the successful creation of the particle accelerator’s first beams last Wednesday would clear the way for trial collisions this week, the timetable has had to be delayed because of power failures that affected its cooling system.

The problems were resolved finally yesterday and the team was planning to resume circulating beams of protons around the 17-mile (27km) ring last night. The success should allow the two beams to be fired in opposite directions early next week, and then crashed together inside the vast detectors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Although the energy of these first collisions will be only 6 per cent of the maximum the LHC will achieve eventually, they will be a critical step forward. Their results will enable scientists to calibrate and test the detectors, before collisions at about 70 per cent of the accelerator’s capacity begin next month. It is then that the LHC will start to provide data that could prove the existence of the Higgs boson — the so-called God particle — and answer other questions about the nature of the Universe.

Once the two beams had been inserted into the LHC ring last Wednesday, the next task was to “capture” them so that protons could be fired in neat pulses or “bunches”. One of the beams had been captured by Friday, but work was then interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero.

Laurent Tavian, head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) cryogenics group, told The Times yesterday that the faults had now been fixed. Engineers could proceed with “capturing” the second beam, allowing for collisions within days. “The plan is now to capture the second beam, and once both beams are ready and captured we can start to do collisions,” Dr Tavian said.

The first collisions will involve beams with an energy of 0.45 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which previous accelerators have been capable of reaching since the 1980s. The aim is to check that the detectors are working properly. The next goal will be to produce beams with energies of 5TeV, which would smash the 1TeV world record, held by the US Tevatron in Illinois. This is scheduled to happen by October 12, in time for the LHC’s formal inauguration ceremony on October 21.

Over the winter the LHC will be shut down for further fine-tuning. Next year it will be boosted to its maximum energy of 7 TeV to produce results that should shed light on some of the most important and enduring questions in physics.

|sources timesonline.co.uk|