2-May-2017: Large Hadron Collider restarts
The world’s largest and most powerful particle smasher Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has restarted circulating beams of protons for the first time this year, following a 17-week-long extended technical stop. Each year, the machines shut down over the winter break to enable technicians and engineers to perform essential repairs and upgrades, but this year the stop was scheduled to run longer, allowing more complex work to take place.
Work this year included the replacement of a superconducting magnet in the LHC, the installation of a new beam dump in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and a massive cable removal campaign. Among other things, these upgrades will allow the collider to reach a higher integrated luminosity — the higher the luminosity, the more data the experiments can gather to allow them to observe rare processes.