No Black Holes At LHC Until 2009 At Earliest

You can breath a sigh of relief if you thought that the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border would create an Earth-gobbling black hole when it started up last week. A series of technical problems forced a shutdown, and it now looks like the collider will not restart until April 2009.

But last Friday the machine was shut down after an electrical connection between two of the superconducting electromagnets that steer the protons suffered a so-called quench, heating up, melting and leaking helium into the collider tunnel. Liquid helium is used to cool the magnets to superconducting temperatures of only about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. Stray heat can cause the magnets to lose their superconductivity with potentially disastrous consequences.

To make repairs, it will be necessary to warm the magnets up and then cool them back down again, which takes at least two months, engineers say. And that leaves scant time to run the collider before it has to shut down for the winter in early December to save money on electricity.

Higgs' bosun could not be reached (for comment) for now.