LHC to be out of action for a week while connections to transformer are replaced following visit from hungry fouine

The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has been brought to its knees by a beech marten, a member of the weasel family, that chewed through wiring connected to a 66,000-volt transformer.

The Large Hadron Collider on the outskirts of Geneva was designed to recreate in miniature fireballs similar to the conditions that prevailed at the birth of the universe, but operations of the machine, which occupies a 17-mile tunnel beneath Switzerland, have been placed on hold pending repairs to the unit.

The collider, which discovered the Higgs boson in July 2012, is expected to be out of action for a week while the connections to the transformer are replaced. Any remains of the intruder are likely to be removed at the same time.

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In an in-house report on the incident, managers at Cern, the European nuclear physics laboratory that runs the LHC, described the incident at the transformer unit as being caused by a “fouine” – a beech marten native to the region. The report concluded it was “not the best week for the LHC”.

The glitch echoes a similar event in 2009 when the power was cut to one of the LHC’s cooling plants leading to unwelcome temperature rises in the collider’s apparatus. That incident was blamed, at least tentatively, on a bird dropping part of a baguette on a compensating capacitor where the mains supply entered the LHC from the ground.



The machine is scheduled to ramp up to its highest energy level yet in coming weeks after engineers spent the winter months working on the collider. Once back in action, the machine will slam protons together at close to the speed of light in the hope of finding evidence for dark matter and potentially elusive particles called gravitons thought to transmit the force of gravity.

The LHC is not the first of Cern’s accelerators to be brought down by strange incidents. In 1996, the machine’s predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron Collider, had to be opened up after its operators struggled to make beams of particles whip around the machine. After sending cameras around the pipes that carry the high-energy particles, the culprits were discovered: two empty bottles of Heineken.

But none of the incidents compare to the genuine catastrophe that struck the LHC days after it was first switched on. A short circuit in the machine created a massive spark that led to a helium gas explosion in the tunnel. The collider was out of action for more than a year.