CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

https://home.cern/cern-bids-farewell-to-the-lhc-and-enters-long-shutdown-3/

by HelloUsername • 23 days ago

318 105 23 days ago

https://www.nikhef.nl/en/news/final-run-for-the-current-lhc-...

charmd• 23 days ago

I've read that CERN is storing more than 1 exabyte of collisions data these days (up from 600PB during the last long shutdown https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...). Not too shaby...

DiabloD34• 22 days ago

All using ZFS, too

dijit• 22 days ago

uhoh, can only store 1000 of that dataset then. D:

tempay2• 22 days ago

No they're not. At CERN physics data is on:

* CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/

* EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/

There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data.

pjmlp• 23 days ago

Having done my little contribution to ATLAS TDAQ/HLT in the early 2000's, it is an interesting feeling to see the next steps taking shape.

archimedes237• 22 days ago

Hopefully no sophons appear.

kridsdale1• 22 days ago

You don’t want an ocular alarm clock?

underlipton• 22 days ago

Hyperstrategic origami.

nok22kon• 22 days ago

bad timing with the price of RAM and NAND

tempay2• 22 days ago

Maybe not that bad, stopping the accelerator means the storage requirements drop now that data is no longer being taken. Storage is instead just used for simulation and reprocessing which is small in comparision.

So long as the market recovers before HL-LHC starts and the data volume increases it'll be okay. If it doesn't...

gojak2• 22 days ago

They will buy the hardware last, at the end of LHC to get the best hw possible. Helium is a bigger problem, since CERN is the biggest Helium cryo-installation in the world...

kristopolous• 22 days ago

The typo that sometimes got through in official literature still makes me giggle

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acern.ch+%22large+hard...

modeless• 22 days ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20170814124609/http://largehardo...

pryelluw• 22 days ago

Maybe some enterprising Las Vegas citizen will jump at the opportunity to turn that idea into a hard asset.

brokencode• 22 days ago

I feel like the title is a little overdramatic.

They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.

cheschire• 22 days ago

by Tim the Particle Man Taylor

sigmoid10• 22 days ago

Probably because the upgrades to the collider are so significant that it will be called the HL-LHC afterwards.

jdironman• 22 days ago

Hella Large - Large Hadron Collider?

p1mrx• 22 days ago

They're collecting 10X more data, at roughly the same energy per collision.

vikingerik• 22 days ago

The article says "10x luminosity", and here's what seems to be the explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Luminosity_Large_Hadron_C...

That's the wiki article for the new one. Says "Increasing LHC luminosity involves reduction of the beam size at the collision point, and either the reduction of bunch length and spacing, or significant increase in bunch length and population."

The linked article says the new one will have "between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run." So the "10x luminosity" seems to be composed of ~3x more protons at a time along with presumably a ~3x tighter focused beam.

SiempreViernes3• 22 days ago

Yes, but nobody is seriously describing the beam "power" in Watts, they mean power in a statistical discovery sense.

doodlebugging• 22 days ago

I had to chuckle a week or so ago when I was bumbling across the internet and landed on an article that had a link to a nutjob page where the title was something like: "CERN found something so disturbing they had to shut down immediately".

The nutjob article (yes, I did read it, LOL) suggested that they had found some universal truth maybe about God or aliens or something, and it scared them so much they just noped out of the science business to prepare themselves for the inevitable revealing of the "truth".

It is truly no wonder that so much of society is so fundamentally fucking stupid when their trusted information sources are so full of obviously false bullshit.

I can't wait until the LHC is back online zipping tiny things around the ring again in a cosmic demolition derby to find the smallest specs of our reality and give them all whimsical names.

sieste• 22 days ago

I treat these nutjob articles as a subgenre of science fiction and when they're somewhat well written find them very entertaining. The author cosplaying investigative journalist, one part of the audience acting as if it's a real discovery and another part playing debunking and outrage, is all part of the performance and it's hilarious. Check out the flat earth movement, it's great entertainment all around!

krapp• 22 days ago

One of the more popular "explanations" of the Mandela Effect is that CERN broke time somehow.

And of course there was the whole panic about them creating a black hole and destroying the world that was popular enough to make mainstream media.

Sometimes I wonder if we actually deserve science as a species.

Xmd5a• 21 days ago

It is truly no wonder that so much of society is so fundamentally fucking stupid

It's not. You got baited into thinking this is the case.

are so full of obviously false bullshit.

Well, maybe what's less obvious is that there are a lot more people gawking at how stupid other people can be than fools falling for the bullshit you call out.

pif• 22 days ago

Luminosity, not power!

fg137• 22 days ago

My reaction as well.

I was like, "They are abandoning LHC? How come I never heard of the big news?" Turns out the title is absolutely misleading.

ursuscamp• 22 days ago

Too late, damage is already done. We have been on the wrong timeline for years at this point.

drybjed• 22 days ago

El Psy Kongroo.

agar2• 22 days ago

I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science.

If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020?

I could see a timeline in which the SSC got built and discovered the Higgs boson before LHC came online, causing the LHC to be canceled, delayed, and/or starved of funding -- only for the SSC to be shuttered during the "great recession" of 2008 or during any other US Gov't belt tightening exercise. Today we would have neither the SSC nor the LHC.

Or, perhaps SSC would have accelerated other discoveries by 10 to 15 years (SSC go-live was to be in the late-1990's versus LHC's Higgs discovery in 2012).

pfdietz• 22 days ago

Perhaps SSC's cancellation avoided a nightmare scenario where all that energy beyond what was needed to find the Higgs was wasted. And perhaps Science as a whole benefited from diversion of resources away from fundamental particle physics.

agar2• 22 days ago

Perhaps. I do remember the discussion about whether the SSC consumed so much basic research funding that other areas would have their funding significantly constrained.

Basic research has such a long time horizon it's interesting to think of the fundamental grants that might have been affected. Quantum computing? CRISPR? mRNA?

adgjlsfhk1• 22 days ago

From what I've heard, the SSC would have had higher power, but much worse luminosity (i.e. much more noise) than the LHC.

usernamed7• 22 days ago

I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do.

andrewf• 22 days ago

It's a brand gTLD, like .microsoft and .google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Brand...

oliyoung• 22 days ago

To be fair, if any org deserves a vanity TLD it's CERN

saghm• 22 days ago

Yeah, given that the web was basically invented there, it seems pretty reasonable

pezezin• 22 days ago

CERN is so big that they have their own IXP: https://cixp.net/

Also, the web was invented at CERN, so like the other comment said, if someone deserves at gTLD is them.

gojak2• 22 days ago

Actually, in the 2000's CERN was the biggest internet exchange point in Switzerland, while the physical datacenter was not in Switzerland but in France xD

Cockbrand• 22 days ago

I was too, and I was going to ask whether this is a good use of taxpayer money, as the ICANN fee for registering a TLD is $227,000. But given the fact that the Web was invented at CERN, I could imagine that they got a special deal.

Happy to learn about details if someone knows more!

sigmar• 22 days ago

I visited CERN last July. Was lucky enough to get into a group tour. The tour guide was a postdoc researcher who said the only times that public tours are allowed to take an elevator down is during long shutdowns. So while they do this work on LHC might be the best time to swing by for a tour (I might even try to return).

Even without the descent, my tour was great with showing the 70 year timeline, historical early particle accelerator equipment, and a cool view of the ATLAS control room. The facility is awe inspiring and a testament to Europe's willingness to make long-term commitments to furthering science research for the public good.

buildbot• 22 days ago

I worked on a tiny, tiny part of the research for the insertable B layer in ATLAS during long shutdown one as an undergraduate - the 3 year period allowed all the detectors to be upgraded significantly! It will be interesting to see how the current systems are upgraded during this shutdown. Sounds like the ITK for ATLAS is absolutely _insane_ compared to the insertable B layer - 5 billion channels, up from 8 million. I wonder if ITKpix is at all similar to the T3MAPs cmos or FEI4 sensors we worked with…

Edit Looks like it’s very different; and really cool: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928802/files/ATL-ITK-PROC-2025-0...

ComputerGuru• 22 days ago

Am I the only one that feels three/four years is a mighty ambitious timeline for the upgrade? It seems to be a very significant undertaking…

scheme2712• 22 days ago

It's been in the planning stages for at least 5-8 years at this point. The instruments and upgrades have been tested and validated so it's just putting stuff together and then validating/calibrating. Stuff can still happen like the splice issue and repairs.

xAlecto2• 22 days ago

Keep in mind this is for the hardware work. We have been working on the HL-LHC from the physics / beam dynamics / everything else side for close to a decade now.

The other machines in the complex, which we call "injectors" from our mighty tower, have already undergone their own upgrade to be ready for HL-LHC, the LIU (https://home.cern/accelerator-chain-prepares-high-luminosity...).

Nonetheless there are plenty of things to be done and a lot of technologically engaging challenges ahead so this 3-4 years is still ambitious ;)

servo_sausage• 22 days ago

The LHC is such a crazy thing; kilometres of strange infrastructure, thousands of people, all for what seems like pure scientific curiosity.

I think only surpassed by the SETI program in terms of doing it because many nerds think it's really cool.

otabdeveloper44• 22 days ago

Politicians think it's a moonshot project at finding another nuclear bomb type of thing. (None of this would ever be funded without the tenuous nuclear weapons connection.)

KeplerBoy• 22 days ago

That doesn't sound like something one would want to do in cooperation with the entire rest of the world.

SiempreViernes3• 22 days ago

Please just stop typing this sort of nonsense.

max-ch• 22 days ago

I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection.

Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a multi-story building underground, but every inch is covered with cables, sensors etc. Seeing it on photos is one thing, standing inside the biggest machine built by humankind is a completely different experience and hard to put into words.

The amount of thinking and planning that went into it is insane. CERN staff is super-friendly and open to talk and explain. If you have the possibility to visit, do it - especially with guided tours and on their annual Open Days.

dylan6042• 22 days ago

As a high school kid taking physics, we got to tour the Superconducting Super Collider campus. Obviously, this was nothing compared to being next to something that was actually built and did science, but they had a the various instruments and segments the beam tube with the magnets on display. Some students would intern there during the summer. The plug was pulled by Congress before I could apply. That was my introduction to politics in science where the kid like notions of how things worked were shattered.

adastra223• 22 days ago

You can still tour the SSC. Just requires wire cutters and a bit more spelunking.

MikeNotThePope• 22 days ago

I felt a similar way when I visited the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4m telescope in La Palma in the Canary Islands. It’s hard to take pictures of the entire telescope because it’s so damn big. I love experiencing the feeling of being in awe.

madaxe_again2• 22 days ago

I spent a week there between the LEP going offline and the LHC going online on a school trip - the scale of it is just unreal - as you say, photos are one thing, but as you stand there in a vast subterranean cathedral looking up at the frantically complex detectors (we hung out with ATLAS a fair bit) it’s… awesome. In the very literal sense of the word.

Don’t know if you visited the antiproton decelerator/LEAR but they’re similarly unreal - a vast cavern, half a dozen stories high and so large it fades into blackness beyond the floodlights illuminating the various buildings and experiments within there. You descend in a rickety cage loft surrounded by no more than a box of girders, to be greeted by a vision straight out of sci-fi. Vast lead megaliths tower around like the work of some very precise techno-druids, cables and ducts snake across the floor to join unknown experiments occluded by the henges, and in this place, they make the stuff the universe abhors.

Wild stuff.

Oh, I also got to tool around on Tim’s computer which was just sat in the cafeteria at the time.

someonebaggy2• 22 days ago

Sounds like it probably inspired the underground part of Aperture Science

g6pdh2• 22 days ago

I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry more about symbolic roles and political aspects than actual research, as if the PhD->Postdoc->Tenure->Professor career model serves to create real expertise and not vice versa. In general (personally) I've felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact, other than increasing the h-index, hoping to get a permanent position somewhere. Forgive the outburst, I'm in the IT industry now and I'm feeling definitely better, but eventually it was great and educational to do research at CERN.

atemerev2• 22 days ago

I am in the industry too and I wish to get back to the academia sometimes. Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians no matter what are their political convictions (I am pro-Ukraine, of course). But yes, as a Geneva resident, I was at the tunnels too (Alice), and I am always in awe every time I see this wonder of the modern world. Sometimes I wonder how actual humans could build this, much like people did for the pyramids.

kashyapc4• 22 days ago

felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact

Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder

braggerxyz• 22 days ago

I totally feel you. I visited CERN in 2002 when LHC was already in construction and we also visited the construction site of one of the earliest detectors ever build there. This thing was really really huge. We also visited the data center of the detector with its multi-pass data collection system which at that time was super impressive. It was designed to collect Terabytes of data within a fraction of a second. The hardware was very impressive. We also visited the central data center where one of Europe's internet backbones is hosted. The data silos were also very impressive. The amount of compute power and data storage available there were unimaginable high for that time. I think it will dwarf those numbers today while being not that impressive because data and compute density skyrocketed since then.

kakacik• 22 days ago

Same here, beautiful experience and I am not hardcore phsysics/cabling/engineering nerd. The cleanness, the precision of lay of every single little cable, the sheer size of the detector when opened (was there... 2012ish, one of maintenance times).

This is spending that makes me proud to be a human and gives me hope for mankind, in similar vein as ie JWST telescope.

rettichschnidi• 21 days ago

Photos don’t do it justice.

And it does not capture the awe when you notice the constant crackling sounds down there. For which, as the tour guide explained to us, nobody knows the root cause, despite bright minds investigating it.

Sadly, I could not find any sources online about this topic.

zombot• 22 days ago

The LHC is dead, long live the HiLumi LHC!

xAlecto2• 22 days ago

For anyone interested in doing some very special visits this will be a good timing. Long Shutdowns are the only moments where a lot of usually inaccessible places can be visited.

There should be (not yet officially confirmed) an open days after summer next year, just like there was in 2019. Short time frame but for a few days everything(-ish) is accessible, including going down in the LHC tunnel, but many more crazy places.

In the meantime there are still permanent exhibitions and guided tours for those interested. Come have a look at the cool science (made with your taxes)!

andai• 21 days ago

Wow, end of an era. Does this mean the timeline finally goes back to normal? ;)

nasso_dev• 21 days ago

uh oh... does anybody here have a divergence meter?

CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

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