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MEYRIN: The world’s most powerful particle accelerator will on Monday shutter operations for four years of renovations to dramatically boost its collision-capacity and the potential for unlocking one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe: dark matter.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 27-kilometre proton-smashing circular tunnel at the heart of Europe’s physics lab CERN near Geneva — has most famously been used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.
In the tunnel, running about 100 metres below the French-Swiss border area, superconducting magnets and accelerating structures propel particles to extreme energies and then smash them together at phenomenal speeds. But from Monday, activity will stop, as the extraordinary device undergoes upgrades aimed to further increase the precision and intensity of particle collisions.
Once completed, the enhanced particle smasher, donning the enhanced name of High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), is scheduled to begin operations in June 2030, and to run for about a decade.
