The LHC dumped it’s last fill for the year today at 10:20. The scheduled shutdown wasn’t until 18:00, but they couldn’t get another set of lead ions spinning by then (you can see a small spike around 14:00 below when particles were injected but a “trip” dumped the beam before acceleration began). So, we won’t see new collisions until sometime in March and in the meantime there will be much repairing and updating to both the accelerator and detector.

It was a great year for the LHC and there is nothing but exciting things to expect from the coming year!