A weasel shut down the world's most powerful particle smasher when it wandered onto a 66,000-volt transformer and caused a short circuit, Europe's physics lab CERN said. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was halted "following technical issues, including a power cut due to the passage of a weasel on a high voltage electrical transformer," CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier said. The collider suffered a "severe electrical perturbation" Friday, CERN, the French acronym for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said in its daily activity summary. It said the cause was a "short circuit caused by fouine" -- a beech marten, which is a member of the weasel family -- on a 66-kilovolt transformer.
The LHC, housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border, was used to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson, also known as the God particle, by crashing proton beams at velocities near the speed of light. That discovery of the Higgs -- the long-sought maker of mass -- earned the 2013 Nobel physics prize for two of the scientists who had theorised its existence back in 1964.
Friday's incident came at an unfortunate time. Scientists had been gearing up to resume experiments at the giant lab early next week following a technical stoppage of several months, and to relaunch their superpowered hunt for particles that could change our understanding of the Universe.
The weasel was not the first animal to wreak havoc at the LHC. In 2009, a peckish bird briefly knocked out part of the particle collider when it dropped a baguette on an external electrical power supply and triggered a chain reaction that shut down part of the LHC's cooling system. But that time the system was restored within several hours.
After the Higgs discovery, the LHC underwent a two-year upgrade, reopening last year with double energy levels and a vastly expanded the potential for groundbreaking discoveries. The lab allows beams containing billions of protons to shoot through the massive collider in opposite directions. Powerful magnets bend the beams so that they collide at points around the track where four laboratories have batteries of sensors to monitor the smashups. The sub-atomic rubble is then scrutinised for novel particles and the forces that hold them together.
