It was a big year for the largest and most powerful atom smasher ever built, but it looks like the next round of experiments and discoveries from it will have to wait until at least 2015.
CERN scientists will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider after the latest batch of experiments concludes next month as technicians begin repairs on the collider for future use.
The collider, located in Geneva, helped make waves in the world of science this year, with a team of scientists discovering what they believe is the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
The so-called "God particle," which is believed to be the building block of all things and that gives mass to all matter in the known universe, helped put British physicist Peter Higgs, who theorized the concept of the particle, on the fast track to a potential Nobel Prize.
Several science journals and publications are calling the discovery of the particle the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2012.
According to British newspaper The Guardian, engineers will be shutting down the collider for roughly two years in order to ramp up the collider for maximum energy when they reactivate it for another round of experiments in 2015.
The repair work will be focusing on strengthening electrical connections in the machine that were revealed as spots in need of reinforcement after an accident involving a short circuit blew a hole in the collider in September 2008.
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