"Europe's particle research center CERN unveiled budget cuts Friday that will force it to temporarily close its accelerators for a year in 2012, but said its flagship "Big Bang" machine will mainly be unaffected.

It said it would delay upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider's beam intensity by one year, achieving this in 2016 instead of 2015, meaning scientists will have to wait longer for experiments to gather data at a faster rate.

"The whole CERN accelerator complex will now join the LHC in a year-long shutdown," the institute said in a statement. "CERN management considers this a good result for the laboratory given the current financial environment."



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