The work of the Large Hadron Collider had to be suspended because of the ferret

Can you tell me how to get to the LHC?

The Large Hadron Collider is one of the most complex systems ever created by man. The design of the collider uses tens of thousands of different parts and assemblies. It is logical - if the system is complex, then it breaks more often. In this regard, with the LHC it was lucky - it breaks down quite rarely.

All this is due to the large number of technicians who service the collider day and night, and they do it very scrupulously. The more surprising was the surprise of the workers of the system, when the LHC had to be turned off due to problems with the collider's power supply system. And the cause of the breakdown, experts say, is a ferret, which gnawed a transformer and almost instantly died due to high voltage. The animal tasted the 66-kilovolt transformer, writes Interfax.

Because of this, the system turned off the power supply, at CERN the electricity was completely turned off. Specialists will need several days to reinstall the transformer into service. Equipment other than a transformer was not damaged.

“I can confirm that at night we had problems with electricity. We suspect that this could have happened because of a small animal, ”said CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier.

This year, CERN plans to increase the integral luminosity of the collider from 4 reverse femtobarns to 25. Among other plans, an increase in the number of bunches of protons circulating in the accelerator at a time, by about 20%. Thanks to innovations, the BAC team hopes to collect data 8 times more than in 2015.