On 19 September 2008, a quench occurred in about 100 bending magnets in sectors 3-4, causing loss of approximately six tonnes of liquid helium, which was vented into the tunnel, and a temperature rise of about 100 kelvins in some of the affected magnets. Vacuum conditions in the beam pipe were also lost.[24] Shortly after the incident CERN reported that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, and that - due to the time needed to warm up the affected sectors and then cool them back down to operating temperature - it would take at least two months to fix it.[25] On 16 October 2008 CERN released an analysis of the incident, confirming that it was indeed caused by a faulty electrical connection.[26] At most 29 magnets have been damaged in the incident and will have to be repaired or replaced during the winter shutdown.
In the original timeline of the LHC commissioning, the first "modest" high-energy collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 900 GeV were expected to take place before the end of September 2008, and the LHC was expected to be operating at 10 TeV by the time of the official inauguration on 21 October 2008.[27] However, due to the delay caused by the above-mentioned incident, the collider will not be operational again until spring 2009, after the winter shutdown which had already been scheduled to start at the end of November 2008.[7] In the meantime, the superconducting magnets will be trained to work at the full current throughput,[28] such that the LHC will reach the full 14 TeV design energy in the 2009 run.[18]
OMG, I am glad to hear that! I hope to fix it, it costs them trillions of money so it gets to the point where they don't have enough money to fix it and they shut down the project!
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