Physics Today:
Updated 9:44 EST: The CERN twitter feed
reports that both beams at the
Large
Hadron Collider have passed 1.18 TeV at 00:42 Central
European Time on Monday.The LHC is now the highest-energy
accelerator in the world, beating Fermilab's Tevatron collider,
which has energies of 0.98 TeV."We are still coming to terms
with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going," said
CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "It is fantastic. However, we
are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a
lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I'm keeping my
champagne on ice until then.""I was here 20 years ago when we
switched on CERN's last major particle accelerator, LEP," said
Research and Technology Director Steve Myers. "What took us
days or weeks with LEP, we're doing in hours with the LHC. So
far, it all augurs well for a great research program."Next on
the LHC's schedule is increasing the beam intensity and
delivering large quantities of proton collision rates to the
experiments before Christmas.The current commissioning phase
aims to make sure that these higher intensities can be safely
handled and that stable conditions can be guaranteed for the
experiments during collisions.This phase is estimated to take
around a week, after which the LHC will be colliding beams for
calibration purposes until the end of the year.
Related
coverage of the LHC
