The LHC will be undergoing maintenance and upgrades for the next two years, starting February 11, Nature Magazine reported.
The break is known as LS1, which stands for 'long stop one' and will be used to correct several flaws in the original design of the collider. These fixes will allow the LHC to smash protons together with almost double the energy (actually full power).
In 2008, when operators first fired up the LHC, an explosion caused by a bad electrical connection, which subsequently vaporized coolant, damaged a sector of a machine that took nearly a year to repair. The resulting review showed that a system of copper bars designed to draw current away from delicate superconducting cables in case of an emergency were installed in a way that made them susceptible to failure, CERN director for accelerators Steve Myers told Nature. The accelerator team subsequently decided to run the collider at half power until all 10,000 copper connections could be repaired.
But anyone who thinks the scientists working on this project will get a break should think again; the accelerators and 10,000 joints between the LHC's magnets need to be rebuilt, says Nature; new computers will be installed to crunch data while power supplies and systems also need to be replaced. In the detector, new systems will be installed (which would help scientists deal with the torrent of data that will emerge once the machine boots back up) and faulty sensors replaced.
The LHC's biggest discovery to date will keep scientists scrambling. While it's being repaired, graduate students and postdocs will be poring over the last three years' worth of data, searching for unusual signals and inconsistencies in the Higgs-like particle discovered last summer. Teams will work to try and determine the spin of the particle while researchers will try to nail down its behavior, to find out whether it really is the Higgs boson or just a particle that acts like it.
The plan is for the collider to restart at full power by December 2014, but the schedule is tight and there is no room for mistakes. "There's no margin," Myers said.
