When in Europe was early morning, at CERN personnel have started the shutdown operations of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (photo © Julian Herzog), the largest particle accelerator in the world. This is what is called Long shutdown 1 (LS1), the first long break scheduled to revise the equipment and upgrade them. The operations are expected to resume in early 2015 at even higher energies.

The shutdown of LHC was supposed to start on February 11 but ATLAS and CMS, two of the experiments that use it, needed a little more time to finish a calibration of their detectors in order to perform the analysis of the particle collisions made in the beginning of 2013.

The shutdown of LHC will proceed gradually because in the coming weeks several tests will be performed on the equipment to be able to verify their integrity and possibly make repairs or replacements. The incident occurred in 2008 that caused a one-year stop at LHC is still a very bad memory at CERN so this is the best occasion to find other possible weaknesses and eliminate them.

The work planned during the two years of the long shutdown will be very challenging and will commit about half of the personnel. The physicists, however, will not be out of work because the amount of data collected during the many experiments carried out during the past months is enormous and will continue to be analyzed.

Last year, CERN announced the discovery of a particle that’s most likely the elusive Higgs boson. Despite this success, physicists expect much more from LHC, an equipment that cost billions of Euros in order to be a great leap forward for physics providing answers to fundamental scientific questions.

Among the questions scientists hope to get an answer from LHC there are the one concerning the origin of mass but there’s also the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In March 2012 the energy of 8 teraelettronvolt was achieved, the maximum achieved so far in the world. When the operations will resume, LHC should finally be able to reach the energy of 14 teraelettronvolt, the maximum possible for this accelerator.

Answering those basic questions could lead us to a new level of understanding of the universe. In a couple of years, a new era in physics could really begin that would also see new technological advances to run these extraordinary equipment.

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