The big news for the upcoming midwinter maintenance shutdown at CERN LHC is that the shutdown is being extended for six weeks in order to improve the CMS detector.
The improvement is called the CMS 4 layer pixel detector. A slideshow showing its future capabilities can be found on
Um, let me know if that link fails to work.
mollwollfumble said:
The big news for the upcoming midwinter maintenance shutdown at CERN LHC is that the shutdown is being extended for six weeks in order to improve the CMS detector.The improvement is called the CMS 4 layer pixel detector. A slideshow showing its future capabilities can be found on
Um, let me know if that link fails to work.
Think of it as a complete rebuild of the CMS detector, one of the two most powerful detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CMS was one of the two detectors to first find the Higgs boson.
CMS needs to be rebuilt in order to cope with twice the current luminosity of the LHC.
The current three cylindrical layers of detection will be replaced by four, with the innermost at a smaller radius (possible because of better focusing of the LHC within the detector). The current two end-cap detectors will be replaced by six.
The pixel size will be unaffected, but thinner lighter-weight materials will be used, newly cooled by carbon dioxide instead of freon.
New readout chips throughout.
Other electronics will be moved further from the detectors in order to reduce radiation damage.
Production of the new detector is nearing completion. The six week extended shutdown is needed just for installation.
The old CMS detector removed by January, the new one installed at the end of Febraury / beginning of March.
There will also be upgrades to other components of the Large Hadron Collider. The maintenance upgrades to the ATLAS detector will be similar in magnitude to those on previous year-end shutdowns.
Also, and of more important, problems with the Super Proton Sychchrotron (SPS) acceleration phase have limited luminosity during 2016, too high a flux and the SPS beam goes unstable. This will be fixed at year-end 2016.
I expect 2017 to collect twice as much LHC data as 2016. Which in turn is about ten times the data collected in 2015.
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An upgrade of the whole LHC to even higher luminosity has been approved for year-end 2019-2020. This essentially makes it a mew machine. The LHC will spend about a year offline.