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The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has officially concluded its latest scientific chapter and entered a long-term technical shutdown. According to a CERN press release, the launch of the Long Shutdown 3 program marks a large-scale overhaul of the complex’s infrastructure in preparation for the era of the high-luminosity HiLumi LHC.
Over two decades of operation, the collider has completely transformed our scientific understanding of the world, with its greatest triumph being the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Now, engineers face their most complex logistical and technical challenge yet. According to Jean-Philippe Tok, head of the coordination group, specialists will have to dismantle and replace more than a kilometer of giant magnets and other high-tech components with brand-new equipment.
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The upgraded collider, scheduled for full operation in 2030, will increase the luminosity by nearly tenfold. This will allow scientists to collect massive amounts of data and record up to 200 proton collisions per beam crossing, instead of the previous 60. To handle the recording of 5 billion interactions per second, the ATLAS and CMS experimental facilities will undergo a complete replacement of their trigger systems and receive state-of-the-art silicon detectors with billions of readout channels.
At the same time, specialists will modernize the Proton Supersynchrotron, upgrade ISOLDE’s technical infrastructure, power supply lines, and underground utility tunnels. Although particle circulation has been completely halted, scientific work at CERN continues: thousands of physicists are focused on analyzing the vast archives of data that have been accumulated.
The phased restart of the upgraded accelerator complex will begin as early as 2028. This modernization will open up unique opportunities for the global scientific community to study phenomena beyond the Standard Model and seek answers to fundamental questions about the structure of the universe.
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