LHC luminosity upgrade project moving to next phase

Geneva, 29 October 2015. This week more than 230 scientists and engineers from around the world met at CERN to discuss the High-Luminosity LHC - a major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that will increase the accelerator's discovery potential from 2025. After a four year long design study the project is now moving into its second phase, which will see the development of industrial prototypes for various parts of the accelerator. Luminosity is a crucial indicator of performance for an accelerator. It is proportional to the number of particles colliding within a defined amount of time. Since discoveries in particle physics rely on statistics, the greater the number of collisions, the more chances physicists have to see a particle or process that they have not seen before. The High-Luminosity LHC will increase the luminosity by a factor of 10, delivering 10 times more collisions than the LHC would do over the same period of time.