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 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

LHC will run for a further seven weeks in a bid to maximize data for physics following the latest Higgs-search update

CERN physicists are frantically analysing data in the run-up to ICHEP 2012, this year's major particle-physics conference in Melbourne, Australia

Excellent accelerator performance and a higher running energy has ensured the LHC has delivered collisions quickly this year

The LHC is so large that operators have to correct for a surprising source of error - the moon's gravitational pull

At 12.38pm CEST this morning, the LHC shift crew declared "stable beams"

CERN's director of accelerators and technology explains the reasoning behind running at 0.5 Tev higher than in 2011

The experiments' desiderata for the year included either discovery or exclusion of the Higgs boson

The first day of the LHC performance workshop was devoted to a critical review of 2011, with suggestions for improvements to the beams and hardware