LHC breaks energy record
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has today become the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18TeV early this morning.
This is said to exceed the previous world record of 0.98TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s TeVatron collider since 2001 and marks an important milestone toward first physics at the LHC in 2010.
‘We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,’ said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. ‘It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step by step and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.’
These developments come 10 days after the LHC restart. First beams were injected into the LHC on Friday 20 November.
Over the following days, the machine’s operators circulated beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450GeV, gradually increasing the beam lifetime to around 10 hours.
On Monday 23 November, two beams circulated together for the first time and the four big LHC detectors recorded their first collision data.
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