![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Nov 30, they successfully cranked the beam energy up from 450GeV to 1.18TeV. So it's now officially the highest energy particle accelerator in operation in the world (The Tevatron, despite its boastful name, is only 0.98TeV):
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR18.09E.html
In priniciple, they can crank the fucker all the way up to 14TeV, but for now they're going to leave it at 1.18TeV and start cranking up the luminosity. Calibration the rest of this month, and then if all goes well, they will crank the energy up again to 7TeV and do the first real physics experiments early in 2010. Again, it's supposed to go up all the way to 14TeV, but I don't know when they are planning on trying to pin the needle on the energy dial--maybe it's a good thing they are letting it run for a while and hopefully getting some data before breaking it again :) What a toy!
“I was here 20 years ago when we switched on CERN’s last major particle accelerator, LEP,” said Accelerators and Technology Director Steve Myers. “I thought that was a great machine to operate, but this is something else. 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 programme.”
In other exciting (pre-)news, there are rumors afoot about some major news that may be about to break regarding dark matter... stay tuned. But if it's true things are staying remarkably hush. I'm on the edge of my seat... we live in truly fantastic times!
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR18.09E.html
In priniciple, they can crank the fucker all the way up to 14TeV, but for now they're going to leave it at 1.18TeV and start cranking up the luminosity. Calibration the rest of this month, and then if all goes well, they will crank the energy up again to 7TeV and do the first real physics experiments early in 2010. Again, it's supposed to go up all the way to 14TeV, but I don't know when they are planning on trying to pin the needle on the energy dial--maybe it's a good thing they are letting it run for a while and hopefully getting some data before breaking it again :) What a toy!
“I was here 20 years ago when we switched on CERN’s last major particle accelerator, LEP,” said Accelerators and Technology Director Steve Myers. “I thought that was a great machine to operate, but this is something else. 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 programme.”
In other exciting (pre-)news, there are rumors afoot about some major news that may be about to break regarding dark matter... stay tuned. But if it's true things are staying remarkably hush. I'm on the edge of my seat... we live in truly fantastic times!
