The Large Hadron Collider has finished its latest run and is entering a shutdown of several years for its High-Luminosity upgrade. We spoke to one proton about it. It agreed to an interview on the condition that we kept up.

The Commute

How are you?

Tired. People assume fast and tired don’t go together. They do. I’m travelling at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light and I still feel behind.

Describe a typical day.

I do 11,245 laps of a 27 kilometre ring every second. There are no windows. There is a pipe, inside a magnet, inside a tunnel. Every nanosecond feels like a Monday morning.

Do you get a lunch break?

No. There is something called a beam dump, but it isn’t the same thing. I haven’t eaten a sandwich in sixteen years. I’d also need a mouth.

Is it cold in there?

The magnets run at 1.9 kelvin. That’s colder than space. Nobody has ever offered me a jumper.

The Flatmates

You live with two other particles, we understand.

Two up quarks and a down quark. We’ve shared a flat since roughly the Big Bang. Gluons hold us together. I’m told it’s called confinement. I call it a tenancy agreement with no break clause.

Are they supportive?

They say it’ll be fine. They said it in 2010 and 2015 and 2022. It is never fine, but it is consistent.

The Big One

What do you dread most?

The collision. There are about 115 billion of us in my bunch. At each crossing, a few dozen get picked. You spend your whole life waiting for a tap on the shoulder, and when it comes you are smashed into something and recorded by a detector the size of a cathedral.

Has it happened to you?

I couldn’t say. If it had, I wouldn’t be here to say so. That’s the other thing about it.

Dr Priya Nair, a beam physicist, said the proton’s account needed one correction. “Individual protons are not, strictly speaking, in the machine for sixteen years. A fill lasts around twelve hours. But I wouldn’t dispute the commute. It is a very long commute.”

The Refit

What have you been told about the upgrade?

Brighter beam. That’s all anyone says. Brighter beam. I’ve been in a vacuum for sixteen years. I don’t see how it gets brighter.

Tom Hallett, a magnet engineer working on the upgrade, said the new equipment would squeeze the beams tighter before they meet. “Think of it as a much more efficient lane,” he said. “The aim is a lot more collisions per second, which means a lot more chances of seeing something new.”

That sounds positive.

It does. I’d like to hear it from someone who isn’t the lane.

Have you had time to rest during the shutdown?

That’s the first time anyone’s asked if I’m okay. Thank you. No, I haven’t. Nobody has told me where I’m going to be. I assume the ring.

Is there anything you’d like to say to your colleagues?

Mind the gap between bunches. It’s about seven metres. It matters more than you’d think.

The proton then asked whether the upgrade meant even more of this.

“Yes,” said Dr Nair. “About ten times more collisions, at the end of it.”

The proton said it would think about it, then went round again.