The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher, has entered a planned four-year shutdown that will upgrade it to its most capable form yet.
The particle accelerator was switched off Monday (June 29) and is scheduled to come back online in 2030 as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC), with improvements that will allow it to smash together roughly 10 times more particles than its original design. That data could help spark new discoveries in fundamental physics and shed light on the nature of dark matter, antimatter and the early universe.
“This is a very important moment,” HiLumi LHC project chief Markus Zerlauth told Agence France-Presse. “From Monday, we will be entering a new phase.”
Since its first successful proton collision in 2009, the LHC has allowed physicists to test theories about particle physics and the Standard Model of the subatomic world. It was essential to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which helped explain how tiny fundamental particles acquire mass. The collider covers a 17-mile (27 kilometers) loop at the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva.
The current shutdown is the third long-term, planned pause in the collider’s operations. The first, a two-year shutdown beginning in 2013, consolidated connections between superconducting magnets and boosted the energy of the colliding proton beams. A second pause, from 2018 to 2022, involved a series of upgrades, replacements and preventive maintenance.
In the current period of dormancy, dubbed Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), specialists will install upgrades to boost the collider’s luminosity by a factor of 10. That will increase the number of particle collisions, roughly tripling the number of times particles will smack into each other compared with the existing setup. Once the final version of the particle accelerator is online, it will run until the end of its operational lifespan in the 2040s and will be earmarked for replacement by a new, higher-energy particle accelerator in the years that follow.
“It really is an opportunity to explore the universe in a way we haven’t done before,” Mark Thomson, director general of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where the LHC is housed, told New Scientist.
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Civil engineers work on upgrades to turn the Large Hadron Collider into the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, significantly increasing the facility’s rate of particle collisions.
(Image credit: Samuel Joseph Hertzog, CERN)
That jump means that experiments will produce much more data, which will allow scientists to study known phenomena, such as the Higgs boson, in more detail and increase the odds of observing rare events. For example, the HiLumi LHC is expected to produce about 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime of a decade or so, compared with the 55 million it’s made to date. The data could help scientists solve problems with the Standard Model, which currently doesn’t incorporate dark matter or dark energy, the primary forms of mass and energy in the universe.
“The LS3 represents a huge and complex logistical and engineering undertaking,” Jean-Philippe Tock, head of the LS3 coordination team, said in a statement. “In the LHC alone, 1.2 km [0.75 miles] of magnets and components will be removed and replaced with new equipment, and across the whole complex, dozens of projects are planned, involving thousands of engineers, physicists, technicians and support personnel.”
While the LHC won’t be smashing any particles together during the shutdown period, researchers will continue to analyze data already collected during experiments during the prior operational window.
Though the LHC’s primary purpose is fundamental physics research, technologies used to upgrade the collider could find their way into everyday life. For example, some instruments and techniques originally developed at CERN are now being used in medical imaging, sensors and art restoration.
