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LHC lets the particles collide!
LHC right after 1 p.m. The particle beams are stable and the first collisions at 7 TeV are produced in all four experiments.
The physics programme of the Large Hadron Collider LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, has started. This afternoon at 13:06 h, accelerator physicists brought the opposing proton beams to collision, each at an energy of 3.5 Tera electron volts, thus producing particle collisions in the four LHC experiments at the highest energies ever taking place in an accelerator.
„Congratulations to the colleagues at CERN,“ says Professor Joachim Mnich, Director in charge of particle physics at DESY. “Today’s start of the LHC physics programme is the crowning event after years of work of many scientists, and at the same time the transition into a real new era of particle physics”.
The LHC will now run for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of 7 Tera electron volts, providing sufficient data for the four experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb to make substantial progress in particle physics. After that period, the LHC will be shut down for a longer maintenance period and will be prepared for operation at full collision energy of 14 Tera electron volts.
