First three-year LHC running period reaches a conclusion

Geneva 14 February 2013. At 7.24am, the shift crew in the CERN Control Centre extracted the beams from the Large Hadron Collider, bringing the machine's first three-year running period to a successful conclusion. The LHC's first run has seen major advances in physics, including the discovery of a new particle that looks increasingly like the long-sought Higgs boson, announced on 4 July 2012. And during the last weeks of the run, the remarkable figure of 100 petabytes of data stored in the CERN mass-storage systems was surpassed. This data volume is roughly equivalent to 700 years of full HD-quality movies. "We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC's first three years," said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. "The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket." The LHC now begins its first long shutdown, LS1.