On March 19, the LHC set yet another energy record as it ramped up to circulate two 3.5 TeV proton beams for the first time. To date, no other accelerator has reached these energy levels.
Since the start of its most current run, which began on November 20, 2009, the LHC has slowly increased the energy levels for circulating beams. After an initial run at .45 TeV, the LHC followed with a record-breaking beam energy of 1.18 TeV on November 30. After recording collisions at 2.36 TeV, the LHC shut down for maintenance in the early months of 2010. In the months since the winter shutdown, crews worked to prepare the machine for higher-energy running.
Now that the LHC has successfully circulated two beams at 3.5 TeV, the next step will be to collide beams at that energy. CERN has set the date for the first collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam), for March 30, 2010. Once these collisions have been established, the LHC will run continuously for 18-24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010.
“With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics program,” said Steve Myers, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
The collisions so far have producted significant quantities of data for the LHC’s four major experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.
