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machine is broken 'Big Bang'

• The machine of 'Big Bang' will stand for two months after suffering a breakdown
  
• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operations on 10th
  
• scientific experiment is considered the most expensive and ambitious history

Project leaders say that "there was no risk to humans"

Updated Saturday 20/09/2008 19:34 (CET ) ELMUNDO.ES AGENCIES

GENEVA .- The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which became operational last day 10 in what is considered the most expensive scientific experiment in history and ambitious, will be out of service for at least two months due to a helium leak, as reported by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) .

a note, CERN said on Friday there was a helium leak in one sector of the LHC tunnel, apparently due to a connection Faulty electrical between two magnets, causing a mechanical failure. "At no time was no risk to humans", according to CERN, which said it has opened a full investigation into the incident. Repairs will involve a delay of "a minimum of two months" in the operations of the LHC, the statement said.

The helium leak forced the makers of the facility to call the fire department to verify that the situation was under control and there was no fire. "We are upset because two months is a rather long delay had already eager to get the first results of the experiment," said a elmundo.es María Chamizo, a English scientific research involved in the LHC. "But are things that inevitably happen sometimes in a machine as complex as this, so there is no choice but to accept it and have a little more patience to be able to start getting down to serious work," the researcher said in a telephone conversation from Geneva.

Repairing the damage will be very complex and expensive, as recognized by James Gillies, Director of Communication at CERN. Keep in mind that the LHC can achieve its extraordinary power if the magnets that make up the interior of the underground tunnel found at a temperature of -271 degrees below zero. The ruling last Friday, however, caused a rise in temperatures up to 100 degrees in a hundred magnets near the area where the fault occurred desencanenó electrical fault. "We are still investigating the cause of the incident, to determine the source of the problem," Gillies explained. "But I do know for certain is it will take at least two months to resolve the problem, because first we will have to heat the entire machine, a remedy, and back to cool again."

This is not the first setback suffered by the particle accelerator. Last week, a group of hackers Greeks managed to enter the computer network of the LHC, to demonstrate the vulnerability of the facility. In the LHC, a circular tunnel 27 kilometers between France and Switzerland, CERN scientists seek to recreate the conditions of 'Big Bang' by collision of particles at the speed of light.

One of the main objectives is to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, dubbed by some "the God particle, whose existence is considered essential to explain why elementary particles have mass and why the masses are so different between them. The tunnel has taken two decades of work in design and construction represents an investment of 4,000 million euros. The aim is to reproduce the conditions that existed immediately after the 'Big Bang', with the intention of unlocking the great mysteries that still surround the nature of matter, and identify with more certainty than ever fundamental bricks that make up the stars, planets and ourselves.