Spin it up, and let’s cross the streams!

Jason Thibeault

The LHC is back in business, baby, and Cosmic Variance covers its shakedown.

This past weekend saw the first beam particles in the LHC since the magnet quench incident of September 2008. Protons and lead ions were threaded in two directions around part of the ring before being dumped, and everything worked without a hitch. The graphs show the ion beam spot entering Collision Point 2 before being dumped.

The LHC machine commissioning will pick up where it left off more than a year ago, and the plan is, if all goes well, to collide beams of protons in the experiments at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) before the end of the year.

I can’t wait for the science to start. Of course, it’ll probably be months before we start seeing world-dooming black holes actual results, but better late than never.

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Spin it up, and let’s cross the streams!

About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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