LHC stops … to regenerate more powerful!

2012 was quite a year for the CERN Large Hadron Collider [LHC]! A year of fundamental achievements both in physics and technology, successfully marking the end of the first 3 years period of data taking of LHC. A two years technical stop is now foreseen to allow improvements that will not only permit the machine to reach its full design energy (7 TeV per beam) and increased luminosity, but also allow the experiments to reach their utmost performance.

So far the LHC has been making continuous progress, exceeding the more optimistic luminosity goals and beam…