LHC Shuts Down: After Higgs-Boson, CERN Takes Two-Year Break for Upgrades to Supercollider

The Large Hadron Collider, the European particle accelerator that identified what might be the Higgs boson, will shut down for two years to allow crews to upgrade it.

The LHC began to shut down on Thursday, and it goes completely offline on Saturday.

"The upgrade will boost the LHC's energy capacity, essential for CERN to confirm definitively that its boson is the Higgs, and allow it to probe new dimensions such as supersymmetry and dark matter," writes The Age.

In 2012, CERN, the organization that runs the collider, found a new particle that they believe is the theoretical Higgs boson, though further tests are required to determine its identity with certainty.

"The aim is to open the discovery domain," said Frederick Bordry, head of CERN's technology department.

"We have what we think is the Higgs, and now we have all the theories about supersymmetry and so on. We need to increase the energy to look at more physics. It's about going into terra incognita."

The LHC was supposed to be shut down for a time last year, but intriguing results that eventually led to the discovery of the new particle delayed the upgrades until now.

"The LHC now begins its first long shutdown, LS1," writes CERN. "Over the coming months major consolidation and maintenance work will be carried out across the whole of CERN's accelerator chain. The LHC will be readied for higher energy running, and the experiments will undergo essential maintenance. LHC running is scheduled to resume in 2015, with the rest of the CERN complex starting up again in the second half of 2014."

Scientists, however, will still be busy during the interim. They have examined less than half of the data collected from the LHC so far.

"Physicists measure data quantity in units known as inverse femtobarns, and by the time the last high energy proton-proton data were recorded in December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments had each recorded around 30 inverse femtobarns, of which over 23 were recorded in 2012," writes CERN.

"To put this into context, the particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July 2012 was found by analysing around 12 inverse femtobarns. That means CERN's experimental physics community still has plenty of data to analyse during LS1."