The Large Hadron Collider halted until 2015

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is stopped for a long retreat for modernization - proton collisions in the accelerator will not resume in the next 20 months, after which the LHC will operate at the total energy, is almost two times higher than the present one.

"Operation completed in 2012. 

I'll see you again for a short time in 2013 during a session of the proton-nucleus collisions. Proton-proton collisions of high-energy will resume in 2015, "- said in a statement on the online status monitor collide.  

"So long and thanks for the fish" - they wrote, quoting from the book of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ", where they are spoken Dolphins, leaving Earth before its destruction.

The Large Hadron Collider, created by scientists from many countries in the area of ​​the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the outskirts of Geneva - the largest in the history of the particle accelerator. It is designed to produce fundamentally new data about the nature of matter and the fundamental physical laws that the cost of its construction more than 6 billion Euros.

Its launch in 2008, triggered a wave of fear in the media - according to one of the exotic theory, the collision of protons in the LHC may be a black hole that will engulf the Earth. Collider worked for about three years, constantly increasing energy, but traces birth of black holes physicists could not be found.

In 2012, the LHC has fulfilled its main task - physicists have found traces of a new particle, which in all respects is very close to the theoretically predicted Higgs boson. This particle is the last missing piece of the Standard Model and is responsible for the masses of all other elementary particles.

According to a preliminary schedule for the accelerator after the Christmas holidays at the LHC will be held another session collisions of protons and lead nuclei. This experiment will be conducted from 14 January to 10 February 2013.

After that, the LHC will be shut down for a 20-month upgrade. After him, scientists expect to increase the total energy collisions of protons from the current 8 TeV to 14 TeV. Increasing the collision energy will allow scientists to get more rare events - for example, to see the Higgs boson, and give more opportunities to look for "new physics" - beyond the Standard Model.