Large Hadron Collider Goes Offline to Make Room for its Enhanced Successor
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The end has come for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but it's not being turned off for fear of the world being sucked into some sort of cosmic anomaly - it's getting a major upgrade.
Physicists at CERN are still bidding goodbye to the LHC, per a Monday announcement from the lab, but this is very much a "the king is dead, long live the king" sort of moment, as the four-year shutdown will result in the completion of the High-Luminosity LHC, or HiLumi LHC, not a full-fledged replacement.
In essence, a younger, fitter model with much better eyesight and most of the same genes will be taking the throne as the world's largest particle accelerator, or human-made machine, for that matter, when it comes online in 2030 after what the lab is calling Long Shutdown 3.
HiLumi LHC will feature a number of upgrades. As its name suggests, increased luminosity is the biggest difference between the new model and the old LHC, which was first switched on in 2008.
Luminosity, as CERN explains, is proportional to the number of collisions produced in a given time. Those collisions are detected in the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC (the pair were responsible for the world's first detection of the Higgs boson in 2012), which will be getting some major upgrades that, per CERN, will effectively make them into entirely new detectors.
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