CERN Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider for Major Upgrade

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Key takeaways

CERN has temporarily shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for a 4-year Long Shutdown 3 (LS3) to execute a $1.5 billion upgrade into the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).
Located 100 meters underground near Geneva, the 26.7-kilometer particle accelerator operates at -271.3°C and reaches energy levels up to 13.6 TeV.
Famous for confirming the Higgs Boson in 2012, the upgraded facility will increase collision rates up to 200 simultaneous collisions per crossing to search for dark matter when operations resume in 2030.

CERN has officially turned off the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to start a 4-year maintenance phase called Long Shutdown 3 (LS3).
Engineers are using this planned pause to carry out a major $1.5 billion hardware upgrade that will transform the facility into the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest, most energetic, and most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed.
Built by CERN, the machine speeds up subatomic particles like protons or lead ions to near light speed and collides them to uncover fundamental secrets of the universe.

The facility rests inside a circular tunnel located about 100 meters underground beneath the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva.
The entire research complex is managed and operated by CERN.

Engineers extract protons from hydrogen gas, accelerate them through pre-accelerators, and inject them into two vacuum pipes moving in opposite directions.
More than 1,200 dipole magnets cooled with liquid helium to -271.3°C steer the beams as they reach 99.9999991% of light speed.
Quadrupole magnets focus the particle beams to collide at four points where specialized detectors including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb capture millions of reactions each second.

The facility uses a 26.7 kilometer underground circular tunnel containing over 9,000 superconducting magnets kept at -271.3°C.
The collider operates at record energy levels of 13.6 TeV, reproducing extreme thermal conditions that existed right after the Big Bang.
The machine famously proved the existence of the Higgs Boson in 2012, completing the Standard Model of particle physics.
Four main underground detectors study specialized topics such as dark matter, antimatter asymmetry, and quark-gluon plasma.
The scientific network involves more than 10,000 scientists and engineers collaborating across more than 100 nations.

Over the 4-year shutdown, technicians will renovate 1.2 kilometers of the tunnel to install niobium-tin magnets, crab cavities, and upgraded subdetectors.
The hardware modifications will increase collision density from 60 to 200 simultaneous collisions per crossing.
Generating 10 times more collision data will allow scientists to study rare physics phenomena and search for dark matter when operations restart in 2030.