ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb are looking ahead to the 20-month shutdown from February 2013

The switch - a test for a longer proton-lead run scheduled for January to February 2013 - presented numerous technical challenges

The LHC has been in luminosity production mode for a couple of weeks - the total integrated luminosity for the year has passed 14 inverse femtobarns

Linear accelerator 4 will deliver particles to the Proton-Synchrotron Booster at more than triple the energy the current linac achieves

A 10% decrease in the LHC's peak luminosity can be explained by changing bunch intensities. Jan Uythoven reports

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has delivered over twice as many collisions to the ATLAS and CMS experiments this year as it did in the whole of 2011

Good performance followed recovery from extended luminosity calibration runs

Discussions under way for possible re-use of LEIR accelerator

A mixed bag of operations and the development of special optics mean the LHC is on track for as much luminosity as possible before the long shutdown