Indiana University physicists are helping manage a $300 million U.S. share of an upgrade to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. The 27-kilometer particle accelerator halted operations for a multi-year shutdown, aiming to multiply data collection tenfold by summer 2030.
Inside the Multi-Year Shutdown and Upgrade Plan
The Large Hadron Collider, the 27-kilometer ring buried roughly 100 meters below the French-Swiss border, has officially stopped operations. After completing its final collision and physics run, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator entered a major overhaul period known as Long Shutdown 3 (LS3). Operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the facility will remain dark for roughly three and a half to four years.
The overhaul is designed to transform the facility into the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, a machine engineered to crank up the collision rate by a factor of up to ten .
During the renovations, crews will remove and replace an estimated 1.2 kilometers of magnets and components with new equipment (LS3). New superconducting magnets capable of further concentrating the particle beams will be installed . The total cost of the upgrade is expected to tick in at 1.2 billion Swiss francs, translating to approximately $1.5 billion USD . Membership fees from CERN cover this budget, alongside in-kind contributions making up 10 to 15 percent of the total from partners including the United States, Japan, Canada, and China .
Indiana University’s Role in the Global ATLAS Collaboration
Indiana University physicists are embedded directly in this global effort. Harold Hal
Evans, a professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU, serves as the deputy project manager overseeing the United States’ roughly $300 million share of the upgrade . IU has participated in the ATLAS experiment since it began operating in 2009 .
ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the collider, uniting approximately 245 institutions from over 40 countries and involving around 6,000 physicists, engineers, technicians, and students . Following the conclusion of Run 3,
which recorded more than twice the collision data of Runs 1 and 2 combined, teams are now rebuilding the detectors .
“The LHC is now entering a roughly three-year shutdown so crews can rebuild it to produce far more intense beams of protons. IU and its partners are using the pause to install detector upgrades scientists have spent years designing and building.”
Harold “Hal” Evans, Professor of Physics, Indiana University
The upgraded detector will feature more than 10 billion readout channels .
Hunting for Dark Matter and Rare Higgs Boson Events
The primary scientific driver behind the massive expense is the pursuit of physics beyond the Standard Model. While the Standard Model correctly predicts experimental results with remarkable precision, it fails to explain dark matter—the invisible substance making up about 25 percent of the universe—or dark energy, which accounts for about 65 percent . It also leaves out gravity and neutrino behaviors .
Once operational in summer 2030, the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider will pack between 140 and 200 proton-proton collisions into every bunch crossing, up from roughly 60 during prior runs . This surge in intensity means the machine will produce nearly a factor of 10 more data than current baselines, allowing researchers to collect up to 100 times more data over its lifetime .
That volume creates a distinct engineering hurdle. The collider will generate several billion interactions every second, making it impossible to store all raw data .
“This research could eventually apply beyond ATLAS to any technology that needs to filter huge amounts of fast-arriving data in real time.”
Harold “Hal” Evans, Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Researchers also hope to build on the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, which earned Peter Higgs and Francois Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics .
Timeline and the Road to Run Four
With the shutdown underway, the machine is scheduled to start taking data again in summer 2030, which will be the start of Run Four . The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider era will then run for about a decade across multiple data collection periods .
While physical collisions are paused, scientific work across the collaboration remains active. Thousands of researchers will continue analyzing the massive mountain of data collected during Run 3 while hardware components are swapped out.
Worth a look
