LHC shuts down to prepare for peak energy in 2015

[Nipuna]

Superconducting makeover (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

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Fresh from its discovery of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is taking a two-year break. But there is no vacation for the engineers who run the collider, nor the physicists who crunch its data.

Since 2009, the LHC, at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, has mostly been smashing together two beams of protons. The beams each reached peak energies of 4 trillion electronvolts, enough to discover the Higgs, the particle that bestows mass on others.

Over the next two years, engineers will be giving the machine a revamp that will push it to 7 or 7.5 TeV per beam, its maximum design energy. The interconnects between the LHC's 1695 superconducting magnets will be rebuilt, for example.

More energy should reveal more new particles, such as evidence of dark matter, so-called "superpartners" to complement ordinary particles, and hints of extra dimensions.

Physicists, meanwhile, are busy determining the exact nature of the Higgs boson using existing data.