GENEVA, October 21 (RIA Novosti) - The inauguration ceremony of the Large Hadron Collider went ahead in Geneva on Tuesday, even though the multi-billion dollar experimental device is out of action for several months. (VIDEO)

The collider, developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with contributions from 80 countries, was test launched on September 10, but shut down later that month after a faulty electrical connection caused a helium leak.

The inauguration ceremony was attended by French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, Swiss President Pascal Couchepin, and Russian Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko, along with several other officials.

The CERN press service said in late September the device will not be restarted until spring.

On September 10 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 Large Hadron Collider project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.