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Nearly there…
By Hamish Johnston
Early this morning the Large Hadron Collider passed yet another milestone as both beams reached 1.18 TeV — smashing the previous record of 980 GeV held by the Tevatron at Fermilab.
“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
So far, the accelerator has been run with a low intensity pilot beam — but now LHC beam jockeys will try to boost the intensity so the collider’s experiments can be further calibrated by gathering collision data before Christmas.
This intensity ramp-up is expected to take a week, and then it’s time for collisions.
The first physics experiments are scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).
It’s going to be another exciting week at CERN!
Althought do remember that it’s still not the worlds largest particle collider.
The beam energy increase is part of the work on beam intensity and focus. It’ll take a while, a couple of weeks or so, before the beams are collided again.
The initial collisions weren’t so much about physics, but about machine calibration. There’s been a lot of computation done on those collisions, in order to profile the detectors. That’s important so that as we ramp up the beam energy and luminosity we have accurate models of how they actually work (as opposed to predictions).
The LHC, in addition to working at higher beam energies, will be much more luminious than previous colliders – that requires careful focusing of the beam.
If it isn’t the world’s largest particle collider, then what is?