In June CERN director general Robert Aymar announced that the $7 billion Large Hadron Collider would start up in May 2008, eight months later than planned. The delay was no surprise to accelerator and particle physicists, and it was generally blamed on a highly publicized failure related to magnets made at the US’s Fermilab. Actually, the magnets only added to other complications at the LHC.
“We’ve had to adjust the schedule to take into account the problems we’ve had,” says LHC project leader Lyn Evans. The current plan is to begin engineering trials at 900 GeV next May and then ramp up to 14 TeV by mid-July. Even with the delays, Aymar says that for physics experiments, “the startup date remains exactly the same—July 2008.”
The LHC was first proposed in 1984, and installation began in 2000 after an earlier accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) Collider, was shut down. To...
