Wednesday, December 16 marked the end of the first period of operation for the Large Hadron Collider, during which new world records were set and the data-taking process began. After important milestones in November, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator went on to provide data that has now been distributed around the world on the LHC computing grid for analysis. in the last few weeks of its operation, LHC experiments recorded over a million particle collisions.
The LHC restart in February 2010 following a technical stop that will allow crews to complete commissioning work and upgrades to the the new machine protection systems and the water cooling system.
“This first running period has served its purpose fully: testing all the LHC’s systems, providing calibration data for the experiments and showing what needs to be done to prepare the machine for a sustained period of running at higher energy,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
For more information, visit the CERN website.
