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Up and running: The first proton beams have been injected into the LHC in preparation for its second run. (Courtesy: Maximilien Brice/CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
The first proton beams of the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were circulated earlier today. Travelling in opposite directions around the collider at CERN in Geneva, each beam was injected at 450 GeV. If all goes well over the next few days, the energy of each beam will be increased to the operating energy of 6.5 TeV.
“After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape,” says CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “But the most important step is still to come, when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels.”
You can follow all the excitement at the LHC Dashboard, which provides information about the collider in real time. There is also much more about what physicists hope to discover during the second run in our news article “Large Hadron Collider fires up in a bid to shake up the Standard Model”.
i would like to hear all I can about the lch
Yes, the LHC started yesterday. Let us hope that it does reach the aimed at 13 TeV in May on the way to see something new – beyond the complete and terribly vigilante particle SM.
I don’t see that the Higgs explains mass, or can be proven to be the particle that gives mass to others. Perhaps this is what will be realised (or accepted) next. It just fills a resonant energy gap in the Standard model.
Maybe the electron doesn’t exist either but is really another particle with the same mass, spin and charge.