LHC prepares for new achievements

Geneva, 3 December 2018. Early this morning, operators of the CERN Control Centre turned off the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ending the very successful second run of the world's most powerful particle accelerator. CERN's accelerator complex will be stopped for about two years to enable major upgrade and renovation works. During this second run (2015-2018), the LHC performed beyond expectations, achieving approximately 16 million billion proton-proton collisions at an energy of 13 TeV and large datasets for lead-lead collisions at an energy of 5.02 TeV. These collisions produced an enormous amount of data, with more than 300 petabytes (300 million gigabytes) now permanently archived in CERN's data centre tape libraries. This is the equivalent of 1000 years of 24/7 video streaming! By analysing these data, the LHC experiments have already produced a large amount of results, extending our knowledge of fundamental physics and of the Universe. "The second run of the LHC has been impressive, as we could deliver well beyond our objectives and expectations, producing five times more data than during the first run, at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV," says Frédérick Bordry, CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology.