The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will jump...

Experts, who gathered in Chamonix last week, revised the previous schedule according to which first physicists at the LHC were to switch to medium-energy beam collisions of 10 TeV this summer, following a short period of running at half-power of 7 TeV.

"The most important decision we reached last week is to run the LHC for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam). After that, we"ll go into a long shutdown in which we"ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC"s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run," Steve Myers, Director for Accelerators and Technology, said at CERN website.

"This means that when beams go back into the LHC later this month, we"ll be entering the longest phase of accelerator operation in CERN"s history, scheduled to take us into summer or autumn 2011," he said.

The shutdown is required to prepare the LHC for running at energies significantly higher than collisions at 7 TeV, which would require

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