The team behind Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has sent out a statement to the press that they have begun the process of restarting the massive experimental mechanism – a process which will take nearly a year to complete.
One of world’s most complicated system of machines will require a phased restart as it would need to be ensured that each piece is operating as intended before the next piece can be restarted and brought online.
The facility was shuttered last year in February for repairs and maintenance works. The first phase of shutdown dubbed “Long Shutdown 1? (LS1) began on February 14 and during this phase, the LHC will not be smashing any atoms.
Simon Baird, deputy head of the Engineering department said, “A whole series of renovation work will be carried out around the LHC during LS1”, reported Parity News.
The team maintaining the LHC noted that the facility had begun to suffer from diminishing returns. The team, which estimates the upgrade costs to be somewhere around $4.4 billion, noted that quite a few parts of the system could be improved thanks to development of new technology and improvements on old ways of doing things.
As of now the source – the equipment responsible for stripping electrons off hydrogen atoms – has been restarted. Once confirmed that the source is working as intended, the team will commence a restart of Linac2 – the accelerator responsible for giving protons their initial push. Once Linac2 is operating as intended, a booster responsible for pushing protons even faster will be started.
Much of the upgrades have already been complete and if everything goes as planned the entire reboot should be completed as early as next year.
