GENEVA, Oct 18: Damage to the world’s largest atom smasher caused by a bad electrical connection will take much of the planned winter shutdown to repair, but it will be back in action as planned next spring, a spokesman for the operator said on Friday.

The massive electromagnets deep underground appear to have escaped damage, said spokesman James Gillies of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

But damage to insulation and other parts around 29 of the magnets will likely require that they be brought to the surface for repair, Gillies said.

The failure of a single electrical connection in the Large Hadron Collider caused the equipment to shut down just nine days after the machine’s launch with great fanfare Sept 10.

CERN scientists had already determined that one connection out of 10,000 was badly soldered, causing electrical resistance that led to the fault, but it has taken until now for the super-cooled equipment to warm up enough so that experts could examine it and decide what needed to be fixed.—AP