CBC News reports

Repair work to the world's biggest particle collider may take until early summer and cost at least 25 million Swiss francs, or $25.6 million Cdn, its operator said Monday.

Fixing an electrical failure that shut down the Large Hadron Collider in September is likely to take longer than initial estimates, according to a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French acronym CERN.

Spokesman James Gillies is now estimating the restart of the massive physics experiment will be at the end of June or later.

"If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer," he said.

The collider, which lies in an underground facility near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to push protons, using a ring of super-cooled magnets, to speeds and energies never before reached under controlled conditions, and crash them into one another to create and detect a host of new particles.

Built at a cost $3.8 billion and with a total expected cost of over $9 billion, it is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists hoping to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.

The ambitious project has been plagued, however, by a number of delays even before its brief running in September.

The collider was shut down after nine days of operation on Sept. 19 when the meltdown of a small electrical connection caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-kilometre long tunnel, CERN officials said.

The magnets in the collider are cooled at temperatures near absolute zero to make them superconductive and thus better able to accelerate the particles to high speeds, but this means they must be warmed to normal temperatures before repair work can begin, a process that takes about a month.

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