Cern's Large Hadron Collider has been closed down for two
months after suffering a technical fault.
The machine, opened in a
blaze of publicity earlier this month, was turned off at the
weekend as engineers probed a technical fault.
As a result, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be out
of action for at least two months, said Cern.
A magnet failure in the £3.6bn particle accelerator was the
cause of the problem.
Last Friday, a failure known as a "quench" caused around 100 of
the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100
degrees.
The fire brigade were then called out after a tonne of liquid
helium leaked into the LHC tunnel.
Cern admitted the repair work could prove costly. The machine
will now have to be warmed up to make the repair, and then cooled
down again to get back to the necessary operational
temperature.
The LHC is being used to
try to discover what happened after the time of the Big
Bang.