CERN Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider for Major Upgrade

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**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**.