HL-LHC First Stone Footage

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is an upgrade of the LHC to achieve instantaneous luminosities a factor of five larger than the LHC nominal value, thereby enabling the experiments to enlarge their data sample by one order of magnitude compared with the LHC baseline programme. Following five years of design study and R&D, this challenging project requires now about ten years of developments, prototyping, testing and implementation; hence operation is expected to start in the middle of the next decade. The timeline of the project is dictated by the fact that, at the beginning of the next decade, many critical components of the accelerator will reach the end of their lifetime due to radiation damage and will thus need to be replaced. The upgrade phase is therefore crucial not only for the full exploitation of the LHC physics potential, but also to enable operation of the collider beyond 2025.