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Get a look inside the caverns and tunnels that house the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom-smasher.
After coming through with evidence for the long-sought Higgs Boson, Europe's Large Hadron Collider has begun a two-year "Long Shutdown," during which its underground components will be upgraded to run at even higher energies.
The last interacting particle beams were extracted from the machine at 7:24 a.m. Thursday Geneva time, the CERN nuclear physics center said in a news release. Most of the final beam runs were conducted with lead ions as well as protons, to study the conditions that existed in the universe just after the big bang. CERN said single-beam studies will wind down this weekend, and then the LHC's super-cooled components will be brought up to room temperature so that work can begin.
The "Long Shutdown 1," or LS1, marks the longest hiatus for the $10 billion collider since physics runs began in 2009.
"We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said. "The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket."
That discovery, announced last July, was the detection of a new subatomic particle fitting the expected characteristics of the Higgs boson, the last big piece of the puzzle for particle physics' Standard Model. The Higgs boson is thought to play a role in producing the rest mass of fundamental particles. Physicists are continuing to analyze data from the LHC's detectors and are expected to provide further details about the new "Higgs-like particle" in the weeks and months ahead.
The LHC has been running at a top energy of 4 trillion electron volts, or 4 TeV per beam, but during the Long Shutdown, the facility's magnets and connections will be checked and upgraded to the point that it can run at its maximum design energy of 7 TeV per beam, starting in 2015. Problems with the LHC's magnets and connections bedeviled the collider during its construction phase: In 2008, a faulty connection caused an explosion that delayed the start of science operations for nearly a year. That incident led CERN to take a go-slower approach to ramping up the LHC's energy.
Other parts of the facility will be upgraded during Long Shutdown 1, ranging from CERN's proton synchrotrons to the ventilation system for the LHC's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel.
CERN reports on the start of the Large Hadron Collider's "Long Shutdown 1."
CERN
CERN details the upgrade work to be done at the LHC during 2013-14. Click on the graphic for a larger version.
Detecting the Higgs boson was the top goal for the LHC's thousands of scientists, engineers and support personnel. During the next phase of operations, researchers hope to tease out insights about other mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter, the possibility that all subatomic particles have as-yet-unseen supersymmetric partners, and the potential existence of extra dimensions of space. So far, the LHC's research teams have reported no evidence of such exotic phenomena, but they're hoping that higher energies will reveal "new physics" beyond the Standard Model.
Scientists won't be idle during the tunnel's shutdown: CERN's mass-storage systems are hanging onto 100 quadrillion bytes of data to analyze, most of which was acquired over the past year. CERN says that amount of data is equivalent to about 700 years' worth of HD-quality movies.
"There will be plenty of physics to do during LS1, and not only at the LHC," CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said. "The LHC is the flagship of CERN's experimental program, but is nevertheless just one component of a very varied research infrastructure. All of the other experiments here have ongoing analyses, so I'm looking forward to many interesting results emerging as LS1 progresses."
More about the Large Hadron Collider:
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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nobody seems to care that the thing was built in secret until it was almost ready to run...at at least 10 billion dollars...no sane person would have approved the colossal wast of money...fools.. none of this waste will change life on earth.
Go back to reading the bible, fool. Next time you use a computer, remember that quantum physics was used to make it. That's the same physics that was experimentally verified and studied with these colliders.
There is no higher purpose than learning the true nature of reality.
What you said about it being built in secret is a complete lie. CERN has been operating transparently for a very long time now. The accelerator design is reviewed by more scientific panels than you can count.
I'll take the opportunity to discredit you further, only because you make it so easy. Here's a sourced quote from Wikipedia:
That makes it by far the largest scientific or technical collaboration ever in the history of mankind! How much did you get paid for your anti-science rhetoric?
Studying the nature of mass can ultimately lead us to anti-gravity and artificial-gravity. It can lead us to places you cannot comprehend.
Posting relatively random inanities seems to be mildly therapeutic for a certain number of people.
Not in a positive way! Their upping the energy next year gives me the creeps. I wonder if all those black holes in the universe were once solar systems each with a planet: home to a great civilization whose super colliders had spewed out an endless stream of teeny black holes. These found each other in black-hearted Valentines days and in time sucked big time.
Here the crucial phrase is "in time;" in time, I won't be here and could hardly care about our scientific community making fools of themselves to a civilization that isn't here either.
@David A Weitzler, if I recall correctly, there exists a threshold, and if black holes are smaller than this threshold, they just evaporate away before they can suck in anything and grow. I'm pretty sure the LHC will never exceed this threshold.
David, The sun (and cosmic sources) routinely slams our atmosphere with particles far more energetic then those made by the LHC. If micro-blackholes were a threat these particles would have done us in a long time ago. We're not doing anything the earth hasn't already seen. We're just doing it in a controlled manor where we can study it at our convenience.
Maybe it's time for the US to think about building the next large collider(s) within the USA. There are numerous conceptual ideas which exist for future colliders. It takes a good ten years, if not more, to build these things. Or have we forever resigned ourselves to being behind?
We kind of missed our chance when the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled. I blame that mostly on the politicans who told them to think BIG, then said forget-about-it when they did. I suppose the land is still there and the initial infrastructure, but they would have to redesign the entire thing from scratch now. What was once supposed to the leading edge collider of its time is now just a memory of what might have been...
Go to Texas, there is a huge underground complex built for a massive collider. A tunnel complex that is many miles long with numerous facilities, it is now classified as a bunker. A really massive bunker for certain high level officials. http://www.damninteresting.com/americas-discarded-superconducting-supercollider/ The US funded and help build the Halderon and that is a fact.
I'm interested and impatient to find out what analysis of this "Higgs-like particle" reveals, and what the higher energies produced after this upgrade will yield. I think these experiments lead to some truly stunning findings and somewhat bizarre conclusions, and it's incredibly exciting to anticipate what textbook changes may follow.
Hopefully they will be able to produce antimatter in greater quantities with the upgrade.
I get FAR more enjoyment from the money invested on the Hadron Collider than I ever will on money spent on friggin war.
Not The God Particle, The God Field if you must call it that
because Einstein was wrong about space curvature, but right about dice.
Why the flaw in his view of space curvature was overlooked is related in my book, Back to the Metriscape, but what he was right about was overlooked too.
The name Louise de Broglie became an icon of the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics when he demonstrated a wavelength for the electron. In 1962, however, de Broglie opined that perhaps physics had missed something. His wavelength explained the wave diffraction pattern for electrons, but in 1962 he suggested that Planck's second theory pointing to Zero Point Energy as the reason behind the unexpected quantum behavior should be considered.
Why would we want to ignore prospects like this and perpetuate theories flawed by self-contradicting non-Euclidean geometry, producing menacing singularities, dreadful infinities, and an incomprehensible multiplicity of spacial dimensions? Check out the Facebook Note, Are We Clinging to Relativistic Space-Time Concepts that Distort Reality?
Check out the Facebook Note, Are We Clinging to Relativistic Space-Time Concepts that Distort Reality?
This gives me the biggest hadron
Sheldon is NOT going to be happy about this!
"700 years' worth of HD-quality movies" - Oh great...now Tarantino has a new goal.
YEAH like this thing is something that we really need How about food for starving Americans and other civilized people of the world
ray this was built in europe with european euros. find your own money for your starving americans.
RAY-3990748, sorry, but just because your limited mind can't appreciate the LHC doesn't make it useless. The problem with starving people is that if you continue to feed them generously, they breed more starving people, and this cycle not only continues but it grows.
Thye need to ion out some bugs... and bigger bangs require bigger bucks probably even for Michele Obama...
All this research and for that matter of fact any research is what fuels our economies of the world, in creation of new products, and protection of human kind and our planet. It is worth every dime. It may save us one day from extinction, believe it or not. I BELIEVE !