The LHC that is. (*groan*)
After the ’slight setback’ last year, that pushed the schedule back by about a year, the LHC is back to being one of the coolest places on Earth.
The magnets of the LHC, during operation, must be cooled to around 1.9 Kelvin, which is around -271.25 Celcius. COOL!
Now that the whole collider is cooled and the new quench system installed (a failsafe mechanism), the first beams can be brought back into the LHC.
At first, the energy of each proton beam will only be a fraction of their design intensity, around 450GeV.
The first collisions should happen in late November, followed by a step up in energy to a few TeV, where the next lot of collisions will happen. This is still less than half of the design intensity, but at this energy, there may still be some new physics to do. It breaks Tevatron’s record of the highest energy particle accelerator lab at least.
At the moment, it’s looking like the LHC will stay with collisions at this lower energy for quite some time, before the final push towards 7 TeV per beam.
After all, it broke once, why risk doing it again when you can get perfectly good data first!?
