Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011

quaith writes "ScienceInsider reports that Europe's Large Hadron Collider will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. The previous plan was to ramp it up to 70% of maximum energy this year. Under the new plan, the LHC will run at 7 trillion electron-volts through 2011. The LHC would then shut down for a year so workers could replace all of its 10,000 interconnects with redesigned ones allowing the LHC to run at its full 14 TeV capacity in 2013. The change raises hopes at the LHC's lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year. Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass."

Comments

Re:Half-measures

[LostCluster]

I'm scared for all the half-lives at risk.

Re:Half-measures

[halcyon1234]

Does this news mean we now only have to be half afraid that they're going to create a black hole that will destroy the Earth?

Nope, we need to be fully afraid that it will destroy half the world. Hopefully the other half.

Another way to look at it

[failedlogic]

In an equally optimistic point of view, if Higgs boson is later shown to not exist, the Tevatron Collider can claim that it was able to not find it before the LHC!