Yesterday the LHC Hardware Commissioning Coordination Team announced the end of the 2009 Hardware Commissioning Campaign as all 8 LHC sectors were declared commissioned and ready for beam. A two day checkout period is now underway, which should have the LHC ready for beam at 17:00 Friday. Friday evening and night should see beams threaded around the machine in both directions. Saturday the plan is to capture a circulating beam in one direction, Sunday in the other direction. Celebratory drinks are scheduled for 17:00 Monday in the CERN Control Center.
Update: Up-to-date news about beam commissioning is here, and hopefully CERN won’t shut off outside access to it. Normally I try and avoid providing links that might be in danger of becoming non-public, but in this case, since the New York Times is linking to this, I suppose I should too.
Update: The LHC Portal is a site with a lot of links to CERN information. For more about the site, see here.
Update: Beam is in the LHC and has made it part way around, to IP3. One place to follow progress is here.
Just as I finished writing that, I see it’s now at IP5.
Update: After a short stop to recover from a magnet quench, the beam has now gone all the way around the ring, making two turns.
Noooooooo way, apparently another magnet has quenched..?!
T.,
Magnet quenches are fairly common. The problem last year was the failure of the system that protects the machine when they happen.
follow the LHC beam circulation on http://twitter.com/cern
LHC is back 🙂 🙂 🙂
Thx Peter. well this protection system now appears to be doing its job properly -at the very least it didn’t fail immediately, this would have been death by ridicule.
Cool mention of my site. I hope you guys enjoy it. If you want to keep track of daily happenings the best spot is http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/cms-e-commentary09.htm which is on my site under CMS and Live Log