MOSCOW, August 5 (RIA Novosti) - The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Wednesday that the cost of repairing the Large Hadron Collider, which has been out of operation since last September, will be $37.7 million.
The repair bill of 40 million Swiss francs confirms an estimate announced in January by CERN's director general, Rolf Heuer. Earlier estimates had put the figure at $28 million.
"The total cost for repair, consolidation, new quench protection system and replacing spare magnets is 40 million Swiss Francs," James Gillies told RIA Novosti.
The construction of the collider took around 20 years and cost $4.9 billion.
Experiments using the particle accelerator were suspended due to a helium leak into the tunnel housing the device and a subsequent electrical fault.
The collider, located 100 meters under the French-Swiss border with a circumference of 27 km, enables scientists to shoot sub-atomic particles round an accelerator ring at almost the speed of light, channeled by powerful fields produced by superconducting magnets.
In order to fire beams of protons round the vast underground circular device, the entire ring must be cooled by liquid helium to minus 271 degrees C, just two degrees above absolute zero.
By colliding particles in front of immensely powerful detectors, scientists hope to detect the Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle," which was hypothesized in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass. Discovering the particle could explain how matter appeared in the split-second after the Big Bang.
"Three weeks ago vacuum leaks occurred in both Sector 8-1 and 2-3. While the cause and exact locations of the leaks are still unknown, it is suspected that they occurred in both cases from a flexible hose in the liquid helium transport circuits, which vented helium into the vacuum insulation," Gillies explained.
He said researchers plan to restart the LHC in November instead of September as previously planned.
The international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.
