CERN's Director for Accelerators Steve Myers announced today that for the first time two beams are circulating simultaneously in the LHC. The announcement was made at a press conference held at the laboratory. The first individual circulating beams of 2009 were successfully established on Friday, November 20.
The next steps will be a careful, systematic testing of the accelerator.
“We will systematically go through all the measurements, put all the systems through their tests, and when we're sure everything's safe, we will increase the beam intensity," explained Myers. “During some shifts we will try to accelerate beam to the maximum energy for this year - 1200 GeV per beam. Then we will decide about collisions. Two possibilities are to collide at the 450 GeV injection energy or at 1200 GeV per beam. That is our program until just before Christmas.” Over the next year, the energy will be ramped to 3.5 TeV (3500 GeV) per beam, and then possibly to a maximum of 5 TeV.
“With 3.5 TeV per beam we will open new windows to new physics,” noted CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer.
Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment, observed, “This is at the same time the end of twenty years of effort by the international scientific community to build a machine and detector of unprecedented complexity and technological challenges, and the beginning of a fantastic era of physics exploration and discovery.”
By Daisy Yuhas and
