Just as CERN finished repairing the damage last September's Large Hadron Collider helium leak, a new problem cropped up.

Engineers discovered two vacuum leaks in areas of the enormous atom smasher that are supposed to be maintained at ultracold temperatures. They'll have to warm those areas up to complete the repairs, which will set back the project another couple of months.

Now, it won't be ready for new particle beams until mid-November. Late last year, CERN foresaw the LHC back up and running in July 2009. In February, the schedule was pushed back to September, and now we probably shouldn't expect actual particle beams until late November.

The LHC is currently a full 2 1/2 years behind the schedule laid out in CERN's 2005 annual report by the project's leader, Lyn Evans.

"[O]ur commitment is still firmly behind the objective of colliding beams in the summer of 2007," Evans wrote back then.

With a machine as complex as the LHC, delays aren't exactly surprising. Like the International Space Station or National Ignition Facility, the engineering challenges that these unique projects present are difficult to predict ahead of time.

The delays could mean that U.S. physicists using the well-worn Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago have more time to discover the famed Higgs Boson. If that long postulated but never observed particle is as heavy as scientists suspect, Tevatron scientists still have a shot at spotting some signs of its existence.

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Image: Repairs being carried out on the LHC. CERN.

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