{"id":354150,"date":"2026-01-05T23:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/354150\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T23:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:22:11","slug":"the-large-hadron-collider-is-being-shut-down-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/354150\/","title":{"rendered":"The Large Hadron Collider Is Being Shut Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Large Hadron Collider<\/a> is going to be shut down \u2014 not permanently, but for a pretty long time \u2014 and the famous atom smasher\u2019s eventual final retirement is also something that top scientists are now considering.<\/p>\n

A 16-mile ring-shaped tunnel near the Swiss-French border, the underground particle accelerator is designed to replicate the cosmos\u2019s extreme conditions shortly after the big bang by whipping up particles to near light speed, at which point physics begins to become extremely weird and counterintuitive.\u00a0In 2012, scientists used the LHC to discover the existence of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that, through incredibly esoteric quantum properties<\/a>, is essentially responsible for giving all other particles their mass.<\/p>\n

Even something responsible for one of the most important scientific discoveries in history needs a facelift, however. Beginning in June, engineers will start upgrading the device so that it can carry out ten times the number of particle collisions it currently can do, something that will allow for far more experiments to be conducted, yielding still more troves of data. The project, dubbed the high-luminosity LHC<\/a>, will take some five years to complete \u2014 and while surely worth it in the long run, that\u2019s an immense amount of down time.<\/p>\n

Rest assured, the LHC won\u2019t be going dark without leaving physicists quite a bit of homework to complete before its return, according to Mark Thomson, the new director general of CERN, the intergovernmental organization and physics lab that oversees the particle accelerator.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe machine is running brilliantly and we\u2019re recording huge amounts of data,\u201d Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be plenty to analyze over the period. The physics results will keep on coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

The LHC will be offline during almost all of Thomson\u2019s term, which started on New Year\u2019s Day. In fact, CERN doesn\u2019t expect the high-luminosity LHC to be operational again until mid-2030. But while it may sound like Thomson is taking the reins at a less exciting period in the device\u2019s history, he says he\u2019s thrilled to be giving it a makeover.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly exciting project,\u201d Thomson told the newspaper. \u201cIt\u2019s more interesting than just sitting here with the machine hammering away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomson is also taking charge as CERN is planning the LHC\u2019s successor. The leading candidate to replace it, per The Guardian, is the gargantuan Future Circular Collider, which at a proposed 56 miles in circumference would make the Hadron look like the kiddie pool. The first stage, designed to smash together electrons and positrons \u2014 the latter are the former\u2019s anti-matter counterpart \u2014 would be built in the late 2040s, with another stage taking its place in the 2070s to accelerate protons to even higher speeds.<\/p>\n

The FCC\u2019s fate, though, is anything but certain. Its slated cost of nearly $19 billion is too much for CERN to pay on its own, according to The Guardian, and there\u2019s also questions swirling over whether huge particle accelerators represent the best way to probe some of the biggest questions in science, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.<\/p>\n

Thomson, though, is still a believer in the big atom smasher.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve not got to the point where we have stopped making discoveries and the FCC is the natural progression. Our goal is to understand the universe at its most fundamental level,\u201d he told The Guardian. \u201cAnd this is absolutely not the time to give up.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on physics: Giant Chinese Orb Detects \u201cGhost Particles\u201d While Buried Under Mountain<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Large Hadron Collider is going to be shut down \u2014 not permanently, but for a pretty long…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[135611,11447,135610,110796,2302,90,52293,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-354150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-cms-collaboration","9":"tag-large-hadron-collider","10":"tag-mark-thomson","11":"tag-particle-accelerator","12":"tag-physics","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-the-guardian","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}