Large Hadron Collider Shuts Down for High-Luminosity Upgrade

The particle collider at the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva closed June 29 to begin preparations for its next version. The shutdown marks the end of operations for the machine in its current configuration.

The High-Luminosity LHC is planned to begin running in 2030.

Workers will remove and replace 1.2 kilometers of accelerator components and upgrade the detectors that record collision results. The new machine will increase luminosity, a measure of how densely protons are packed in the beams, by up to a factor of ten. Officials expect the higher rate to produce data on roughly 380 million Higgs bosons.

Researchers say the additional data could reveal effects that differ from predictions in the standard model of particle physics. The data may also help investigate dark matter and the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter. The current collider, a 27-kilometer ring that crosses the border between France and Switzerland, has operated since 2010.

Its most notable result was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments.