"It will most likely happen in the summer rather than in the spring," the Tribune de Geneve quoted James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), as saying.
The official also said that the CERN Board of Directors will meet on December 12 to discuss repair work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and to determine the possible date for the resumption of its operation.
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.
However, on September 24 the LHC was shut down due to a helium leak into the tunnel housing the device.
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.
