GENEVA, Switzerland, June 5 (UPI) -- The atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider is to run year-round to make up for the year lost to a helium leak, researchers in Geneva said.
The collider was activated last Sept. 10 and shut down nine days later when a connection between two magnets failed, causing a helium leak in the cooling ring.
The collider should be back in business by October or November and operating full time in an attempt to win the international race to find the Higgs boson -- atomic evidence regarding the beginning of creation, project leader Lyn Evans told The Times of London in a story published Friday. The closest competitor in the race is the Tevatron collider, a less powerful accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois.
The Hadron collider's catastrophic breakdown will be forgotten once it begins transmitting new data, Evans said.
"The Hubble Space Telescope also hit a problem which was fixed and it's had a marvelous experience since then," Evans said. "We'll come back in October or November and then we'll be going for a long time."
