Looking under the hood at the LHC (Courtesy: CERN) By Hamish
Johnston By all accounts the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its
experiments are working much better than expected and are
gathering data like gangbusters. So it might seem strange that
many physicists at CERN are keen to shut the whole thing down
for a 20-month overhaul. But that’s going to happen at the end
of February 2013, when the facility in Geneva will go dark. One
key change that must be made to the accelerator is the
replacement of all the connectors between superconducting
magnets to ensure that the LHC can run at a collision energy of
14 TeV – compared with the current energy of 8 TeV. This
overhaul is seen as crucial because it was the failure of one of
these connectors that led to the disastrous explosion of 2008.
Given that no evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model has
emerged from the LHC so far, many physicists must be very keen
to boost the collision energy in the hope that strange things
will happen. As the connectors are r