MOSCOW, September 20 (RIA Novosti) - The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle collider, will be stopped for at least two months due to a "large" helium leak into its tunnel, CERN's press service said on Saturday.

The collider resumed work on Thursday, a day after it was switched off due to an electrical fault, but had to suspend work again on Friday. According to preliminary information, a large amount of helium leaked into the final sector 34 during a test launch at the power of 5 TeV, without the beam of protons.

"Preliminary investigations indicate that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure," the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials as CERN, said in a statement.

As the sector will have to be warmed up before repairs take place, fixing the problem would take "a minimum of two months."

On September 10, scientists successfully 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.