CERN has announced a shutdown dramatic enough that they’re giving it an acronym: LS3, the Long Shutdown 3 for the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. Who knows what the magic tunnels will turn up once they start up again:
Since circulating its first beams in September 2008, the LHC has pushed the frontiers of science and technology, becoming one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built. The accelerator delivered its first proton collisions in 2009 and rapidly established itself as a unique discovery machine – across three operational periods (Runs 1–3), the LHC delivered unprecedented quantities of data to its experiments.
The LHC’s most celebrated achievement came on 4 July 2012, when the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, confirming a mechanism proposed nearly half a century earlier. In the years that followed, the LHC enabled hundreds of major advances, including the discovery of more than 85 hadrons, the setting of exclusion limits on the discovery of new particles, searches into the imbalance between matter and antimatter, exploration of the nature of the quark–gluon plasma, and measurements with important implications for astrophysics. Beyond its scientific output, the LHC drove innovation in accelerator science, superconducting technologies, computing and international collaboration.
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In the LHC caverns, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will undergo extensive upgrades, effectively becoming renewed detectors. To fully exploit the unprecedented performance of the HiLumi LHC, they will need to cope with between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run. This means identifying and selecting the most interesting collisions from more than five billion interactions every second. To meet this challenge, both experiments will completely replace their trigger systems, which are responsible for selecting the most promising events for further analysis. These events will be recorded using advanced new detector technologies, including all-silicon tracking systems with billions of readout channels (far more than in the current detectors), high-precision timing detectors with resolutions of a few tens of picoseconds, and new calorimeter systems capable of operating at megahertz rates.
While no particle beams will circulate during this period, CERN’s scientific activity will remain intense. Thousands of researchers will continue analysing the vast datasets accumulated during the LHC era, extracting new physics results while simultaneously preparing the experiments for the challenges ahead.
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(h/t Splinister)