Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumed work last Thursday, a day after it was switched off due to an electrical fault, but had to suspend work again the following day.
"The winter shutdown will go according to schedule, which means that we start up the accelerator complex in the spring months," said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
On September 10, amid much hype, scientists fired the first beam of protons round the vast underground circular device, which is run from a control room in a suburb of Geneva on the French-Swiss border.
The collider, located 100 meters below ground with a circumference of 27 km, enables scientists to shoot sub-atomic particles round an accelerator ring at almost the speed of light, guided by a powerful field produced by superconductor magnets.
Particles are sent round the ring in extreme vacuum cooled by liquid helium to minus 271 degrees C.
By colliding particles in front of immensely powerful detectors, scientists hope to detect the Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle," which was hypothesized in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass. Discovering the particle could explain how matter appeared in the split-second after the Big Bang.
The international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.
