Large Hadron Accelerator (LHC, as it is known by its acronym in English) of the European Nuclear Research Center (CERN) will be turned off this Monday to begin a complex and long optimization that will give it new potential.
The center, which will be shut down for four years, is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and is located on the border between Switzerland and France.
Once this disconnection is completed, CERN will fully enter into its High Luminosity Large Hadron Accelerator (LHC-HL) project, on which it has been working for nearly two decades, a time that from an ordinary perspective may seem long, but from a scientific approach is what a project of such magnitude requires.
The LHC began operating in 2008, but in the meantime physicists were already beginning to anticipate what would be the next stage and to advance in the conception, design and production of the new components that the LHC-HL will require, as the head of the project, Markus Zerlauth, explained to the press.
The ambitious CERN project is based on the numerous contributions to the knowledge and understanding of particles that the LHC has made in the last twelve years, starting with his most important and media discovery: the Higgs boson in 2012.
That was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st century and led CERN to receive the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
For the LHC to enter its new phase, approximately four years of work and preparations will be required, part of which was launched nearly eight years ago.
At that time, CERN began the excavation of two sections of underground galleries that are about ten meters above and connected to the 27-kilometer-circumference tunnel in the form of a closed circuit that contains the collider and is at an average depth of 100 meters.
The galleries and their arms measure a total of about half a kilometer and are already operational.
Immediately, from there the wiring will be launched and the two sections of the collider will be accessed, which will be the only ones that will undergo a radical change and which represent less than 2 kilometers of the total 27 kilometers of the LHC.
The modifications will mainly involve the replacement of a group of magnets with another of a new generation to increase proton collisions by a factor of ten.while the data obtained will be multiplied by six.
Furthermore, in the new phase, computer systems will be able to determine in milliseconds which data is worth saving for analysis and which can be discarded, since the billions of collisions per second that will occur at the LHC-HL will generate data that would be impossible to store, even for a structure as gigantic and cutting-edge in technology as CERN.