'Little Animal' Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider for Entire Week

large hadron collider CERN beech marten
A beech marten caused a major power cut at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, potentially delaying the discovery of a new dimension. Wikimedia Commons

The Large Hadron Collider will be out of action for the rest of the week after a Beech Marten entered the facility and caused a power cut, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced.

The weasel-like mammal entered the LHC grounds on Friday, April 29, causing one of the open-air electrical transformer units to short circuit.

"The concerned part of the LHC stopped immediately and safely," CERN said in a blogpost on Monday. "Since then the entire machine has remained in standby mode.

"When the little animal jumped onto the transformer, it created a small electrical arc, damaging high-voltage transformer connections."

Large Hadron Collider
A tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN near Geneva in 2014. Pierre Albouy/Reuters

Repairs are expected to be completed by the end of the week as the LHC—the largest and most expensive experimental facility ever built—gears up for a new research phase that could see the discovery of an entirely new particle.

Faint signs of the new particle were first picked up in December but it won't be until the LHC is restarted this month that it will be confirmed. If it exists it could upend the most basic understandings of physics.

"This particle—if it's real—it would be something totally unexpected that tells us we're missing something interesting," Dave Charlton, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham, said in December.

The discovery would potentially be more significant than the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle that was found at the LHC in 2013. CERN scientists suggested the new particle would fill in important gaps of the Standard Model of physics, which aims to explain the structure of the universe. This includes dark matter and potentially new dimensions.

CERN revealed that the Beech Marten incident is not the first time something like this has caused one of its facilities to be shut down.

"Many of CERN's sites are located in the countryside and similar events have happened a few times in the past," its statement reads. "They are part of life of such an accelerator, as with any large industrial installation."

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