The Large Hadron Collider now has an even better chance of finding exciting new physics results in the next few years. Officials at CERN announced on January 31 that the LHC will run until the end of 2012 instead of 2011 as was previously planned. The extra year of operation will be interrupted only by a short technical stop at the end of 2011. Once it finishes this run, it will go into a long shutdown to prepare it for higher beam energies.
The LHC will run at a beam energy of 3.5 TeV for 2011. The decision to keep it in operation for an extra year before the long shutdown was made at the annual planning workshop in Chamonix. Officials hope the additional running time will lead to new, important physics discoveries.
“If LHC continues to improve in 2011 as it did in 2010, we’ve got a very exciting year ahead of us,” said Steve Myers, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology.
“With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvement in performance expected, there’s a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year,” said Sergio Bertolucci, CERN Research Director. “For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC’s current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp.”
