Collisions at 7 TeV c.m. energy scheduled for 30-March
March 23, 2010 at 4:57 am 1 comment
Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN, announced today that the LHC is on schedule to provide collisions at 7 TeV on 30-March-2010, Tuesday a week from now.
A quote from Steve Myers: “With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics programme. 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.
And a quote from Heuer: “The LHC is not a turnkey machine. The machine is working well, but we’re still very much in a commissioning phase and we have to recognize that the first attempt to collide is precisely that. It may take hours or even days to get collisions.”
The CERN press release points out that three days were required to bring the electron and positron beams at LEP into collision. There will be a live webcast and, I presume, lots of press at the LHC control room as well as at CMS, ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE.
I’ll bet that all experiments will perform splendidly, and I hope that the LHC performs as wonderfully as it has these past few weeks…
Entry filed under: Particle Physics. Tags: .
1. Webcast tomorrow on LHC machine commissioning « Collider Blog | March 25, 2010 at 6:41 am
[...] This should be very interesting, in light of the 7 TeV Collisions scheduled for Tuesday, 30-March. (More information here.) [...]