CERN has 2020 vision for LHC upgrade

CERN has 2020 vision for LHC upgrade. Geneva, 16 November 2011. CERN ¹ today kicked off the High Luminosity LHC study with a workshop bringing together scientists and engineers from some 14 European institutions, supported through the European Commission's seventh Framework programme (FP7), along with others from Japan and the USA. The goal is to prepare the ground for an LHC luminosity upgrade scheduled for around 2020. Luminosity gives a measure of the collision rate in a particle accelerator and therefore gives an indication of its performance. The LHC already delivers the highest luminosity beams of any high energy proton accelerator in the world, which is vitally important for physicists wanting to study extremely rare processes. "With the LHC colliding hundreds of millions of particles each second, some of the processes we're interested in will happen just a few times a day" explained CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci, "with processes so rare, extra luminosity makes a big difference to our ability to make precision measurements and discover new things." This week's workshop launches the initial design phase of the project, which aims to take the LHC's luminosity to a factor of 5-10 above its current design value.