After two years of being shut down for power boost and equipment upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle collider, was to have restarted this week. A short circuit in the machine's wiring, however, caused an electrical glitch that halted its grand relaunch.

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CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) released a news update March 24 about this delay it said was triggered by an intermittent short circuit in one of the particle accelarator's vital magnets. An investigation is already being carried out.

Scientists already have a solution at hand, but this process could take time to resolve since the magnet is located in the cold section of the machine and a repair here involves warming up and re cooling.

Any sort of glitch that involves the cryogenic machine involves lengthy delays and a repair that could have taken hours in a warm machine can extend up to weeks in a cold machine, which is the current state of the LHC last fired two years ago.

The machine consists of a 27 kilometer ring of supercooled magnets that take a long time to cool down before the mechanism can maintain a collimated "beam" where particles can be tightly controlled.

The machine operates at temperatures that are closest to zero as much as possible. The ring of electromagnets will consume a lot of energy and time as they warm up and cool down again for repairs.

CERN estimated this restart delay might last from a few days to several weeks. The LHC's Run 2 involves unraveling dark matter, supersymmetry and might even prove the existence of parallel universes.

According to CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer, all the signs are still great for Run 2 at the LHC. A few weeks delay in the quest to understand the universe is more or less just the blink of an eye.

The LHC successfully found the Higgs boson or the "God Particle," which is considered the missing piece in the Standard Model of physics. Now physicists are hoping to find evidence of dark matter, supersymmetry, mini black holes, parallel universes and even the state of matter just moments after the Big Bang.

TagsLHC Short Circuit Slows Restart; Scientists Eager to Find Parallel Universes, dark matter, LHC, CERN, LHC restart delays glitch, dark matter, parallel universes, Large Hadron Collider