LHC begins two-year shutdown period

BBC : In preparation for a two-year upgrade and repair period, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) switched off the proton beams early Thursday morning. It will take until Saturday for the supercooled magnets to warm to room temperature so that they can be inspected for repairs. The 2012 run, during which a possible Higgs particle was detected, reached a beam collision energy of 8 TeV. When the collider begins operations againâmdash;currently planned for February or March 2015âmdash;the energy will be increased to 14 TeV. During the downtime, upgrades are planned for all four of the LHC’s detectors, the shielding for the electronics, and the ventilation system. The scientists will also be working their way through all of the data they collected during the 2012 run, which provided more than twice as much data as the 2011 run.