‘ World’s largest particle smasher takes 2- yr break’

Geneva, Dec. 10: The Large Hadron Collider ( LHC) — world’s most powerful particle accelerator — has been stopped for about two years to enable major upgrades and renovations, CERN said.

Operators of the CERN Control Centre turned off LHC on December 3. The operations will resume in 2021.

During its second run ( 2015- 2018), the LHC performed beyond expectations, achieving approximately 16 million billion proton- proton collisions at an energy of 13 TeV and large datasets for lead- lead collisions at an energy of 5.02 TeV, CERN said in a statement.

These collisions produced an enormous amount of data, with more than 300 million gigabytes now permanently archived in CERN’s data centre tape libraries.

This is the equivalent of 1,000 years of 24/ 7 video streaming, researchers said.

By analysing these data, the LHC experiments have already produced a large amount of results, extending our knowledge of fundamental physics and of the universe.

“The second run of the LHC has been impressive, as we could deliver well beyond our objectives and expectations, producing five times more data than during

The LHC experiments have produced a large amount of results, extending our knowledge of fundamental physics and of the universe. Increasing the luminosity of the LHC means producing far more data.

◗ the first run, at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV,” said Frederick Bordry, CERN director for Accelerators and Technology.

“With this second long shutdown starting now, we will prepare the machine for even more collisions at the design energy of 14 TeV,” Bordry said.

“Over the past few years the LHC experiments have made tremendous progress in the understanding of the properties of the Higgs boson,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director- General.

“The Higgs boson is a special particle, very different from the other elementary particles observed so far; its properties may give us useful indications about physics beyond the Standard Model,” Gianotti said.