Following CERN’s April Fools’ Day prank in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research confirmed the existence of the Force — a Star Wars reference to the energy field created by all living things, which empowers the Jedi — the organization indicated that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be restarted within the next few days, as the teams tasked with fixing a previously detected short circuit has successfully repaired the short circuit.
In a tweet on CERN’s confirmed Twitter account, the organization tweeted to their more than 1.1 million followers that the teams are wrapping up the final tests and the restart could occur sometime between Saturday and Monday.
Teams are completing final tests, #RestartLHC could be sometime between Saturday & Monday: http://t.co/JNk98d8rAO pic.twitter.com/HWaO5rO1Cq
— CERN (@CERN) April 2, 2015
The glitch behind the short circuit, which was first identified on March 21 of this year, has been attributed to a piece of metal debris in a diode box, which short-circuited the magnet’s power supply.
According to Paul Collier, head of beams at CERN, the first attempt to remove the fragment appears to have been successful.
Collier was quoted in a Nature News report as having said that it “passed” the tests and that “the short is gone,” but engineers must now reinstall monitoring and protection equipment before they can re-power the circuit.
It passed. The short is gone […] We hope to be ready to take beam sometimes during the weekend.
The LHC, while running at half its capabilities, was used by physicists to discover the elusive subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson back in 2012. A Nobel Prize was subsequently awarded for the discovery.
Are you excited to see the Large Hadron Collider back in business, smashing protons at an unprecedented rate of a billion times per second?
