Today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, comes to the end of an extraordinary chapter in its scientific journey. Following its final physics run, the accelerator has been switched off to begin CERN’s Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), a major programme of maintenance, consolidation, upgrades and installation work that will prepare the Laboratory for the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC), the next phase in the exploration of the fundamental laws of nature.
Since circulating its first beams in September 2008, the LHC has pushed the frontiers of science and technology, becoming one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built. The accelerator delivered its first proton collisions in 2009 and rapidly established itself as a unique discovery machine – across three operational periods (Runs 1–3), the LHC delivered unprecedented quantities of data to its experiments.
The LHC’s most celebrated achievement came on 4 July 2012, when the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, confirming a mechanism proposed nearly half a century earlier. In the years that followed, the LHC enabled hundreds of major advances, including the discovery of more than 85 hadrons, the setting of exclusion limits on the discovery of new particles, searches into the imbalance between matter and antimatter, exploration of the nature of the quark–gluon plasma, and measurements with important implications for astrophysics. Beyond its scientific output, the LHC drove innovation in accelerator science, superconducting technologies, computing and international collaboration.
As the accelerator enters a new phase, CERN celebrates not only the discoveries made, but also the global community that made them possible.
“The LHC has exceeded every expectation,” said Oliver Brüning, CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology. “For nearly two decades, it has transformed our understanding of the Universe and inspired generations of scientists, engineers and citizens around the world. Today we say goodbye to the LHC as we have known it, while preparing to welcome its successor: the HiLumi LHC, which will extend this scientific adventure far into the future.”
Nikhef’s role at the LHC
Nikhef is closely involved in upgrading the experiments in which the institute participates. For the ATLAS detector, Nikhef and others are designing and building, among other things, a new internal detector, the ITk. Its assembly takes place in a special cleanroom in Amsterdam. Further upgrades have already been made for ALICE and LHCb, partly with new sensor and data technology.
The arrival of the HiLumi-LHC also requires heavier and faster data connections from CERN to data centres elsewhere. To this end, Nikhef has been conducting tests with ultra-fast data connections for quite some time, sometimes the fastest in the world over such distances.
Read the entire CERN press release: https://home.cern/cern-bids-farewell-to-the-lhc-and-enters-long-shutdown-3/
More information about LHC: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider/
More information about the HiLumi-LHC: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/hilumi-lhc/
