Nearly there…
By Hamish Johnston
Early this morning the Large Hadron Collider passed yet another milestone as both beams reached 1.18 TeV — smashing the previous record of 980 GeV held by the Tevatron at Fermilab.
“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
So far, the accelerator has been run with a low intensity pilot beam — but now LHC beam jockeys will try to boost the intensity so the collider’s experiments can be further calibrated by gathering collision data before Christmas.
This intensity ramp-up is expected to take a week, and then it’s time for collisions.
The first physics experiments are scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).
It’s going to be another exciting week at CERN!
