The LHC is down, a look back at the Higgs, and Francois Englert passes away

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is down. But not forever. As the folks at Universe Today put it: “See You Later, Accelerator!” The LHC is beginning its L3 extended maintenance and upgrades. The upgrades will be completed in 2030, when the LHC will be transformed into the High-Luminosity (HiLumi) LHC and will produce significantly more particle collisions as it dives deeper into the heart of matter. Image By Maximilien Brice (CERN) – CERN Document Server, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29068933

The LHC is best known for the discovery back on July 4, 2012 (14 years ago this month) of the Higgs Boson, the particle that gives (some) other particles mass. The Higgs is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who, along with others, laid the foundation for it back in the 1960s. Understanding the Higgs is not the easiest, so we found a few articles and videos below to help (or maybe hinder).

On a sad note, François Englert, who won the Nobel prize along with Peter Higgs in 2013, passed away on June 18 at the age of 93. Englert, along with Robert Brout were the first of a group of six to publish papers describing what would be known as the Higgs. Peter Higgs came next, followed by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble. Higgs was the only one to actually predict a particle and, over time, it has become associated with him.

LHC. Image By Maximilien Brice (CERN) – CERN Document Server, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29068933
Francois Englert.
Image Credit: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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