Large Hadron Collider Begins 4-Year Shutdown for 10x Luminosity Upgrade
Updated
Updated · Livescience.com · Jun 30
Large Hadron Collider Begins 4-Year Shutdown for 10x Luminosity Upgrade
3 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Jun 30
Summary
CERN switched off the Large Hadron Collider on June 29, starting a planned four-year shutdown before it reopens in 2030 as the High-Luminosity LHC.
The LS3 overhaul is designed to raise luminosity by a factor of 10, roughly tripling collision rates and sharply increasing the volume of experimental data.
About 1.2 kilometers of magnets and components will be removed and replaced in the LHC alone, with thousands of engineers, physicists and technicians involved across dozens of projects.
That extra data is expected to let scientists study the Higgs boson in far greater detail and capture rare events tied to dark matter, antimatter and gaps in the Standard Model.
The upgraded collider is expected to run into the 2040s, producing about 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime versus roughly 55 million generated so far.
As other dark matter projects lose funding, is the LHC's costly upgrade a high-stakes gamble on finding new physics?
Beyond cosmic mysteries, what revolutionary technologies from the LHC's upgrade will reshape medicine, computing, and our future?
The High-Luminosity LHC Upgrade: Ushering in a New Era of Discovery and Global Collaboration (2026–2040)
Overview
On June 29, 2026, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ended its operational phase and began a four-year upgrade to become the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). This major transformation will boost the accelerator’s luminosity, greatly increasing collision rates and data collection. As a result, scientists will have new opportunities to explore the universe’s deepest mysteries and answer fundamental questions in physics. The HL-LHC marks the start of a new era, fundamentally enhancing the capabilities of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and paving the way for groundbreaking discoveries.