Overview
- CERN powered down the Large Hadron Collider on Monday to begin a planned four-year work period that will convert it into the High-Luminosity LHC.
- Teams will replace roughly 1.2 kilometers of accelerator components and fit new superconducting magnets in two upgraded sections of the 27 km tunnel.
- The project aims to raise luminosity by about tenfold, boost collisions per crossing to roughly 140–200, and produce far more data than the current machine.
- CERN will deploy faster detectors, new cabling and global computing plus AI-based real-time filters to select the most valuable events from the vastly larger data flow.
- The upgrade, built on years of preparatory civil works and an estimated CHF 1.2 billion investment, targets a June 2030 restart followed by roughly a decade of HL-LHC running to deepen searches for new particles and study Higgs properties.