Beam commissioning has started for 2010, with beam back in the LHC starting early Sunday morning. The plan is for roughly a month until colliding beams at 3.5 TeV/beam.
For the latest news, see here and here.
Update: Please, everyone, stop e-mailing me and posting comments here with the “news” (e.g. here or here) that the LHC will shutdown for a year or more in the future to fix bad splices. This is not news, it was announced by CERN back in January (see here).
It is curious that there is so much verbosity on “Quants” etc and so few comments on the various LHC update posts. Kudos to PW for diligently staying up-to-date and spreading the word on the LHC commissioning. You see now (I hope!) the difficulties of the reality of bringing a state-of-the-art superconducting collider to fruition. May I suggest for your further reading two articles (Part I and II actually) directly connected with the same subject, viz the problems and ultimate failure of the ISABELLE superconducting collider at BNL in the 1970’s. (Today RHIC occupies the old ISABELLE tunnel.)
Parts I and II
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r114825754r38578/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/824344k282615438/
Well worth reading. You may need a journal subscription. Crease is a professor at Stony Brook and the resident historian of BNL. The consequences of the ISABELLE demise affect the US HEP community to this day. It is a lesson in leadership as well as pure physics. Don’t complain if the CERN management is cautious about the LHC.
The BBC will be broadcasting a programme about the last year at the LHC this evening.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvpb9
It will probably be available for download after being broadcast, although it may be restricted to UK IP addresses.
“Don’t complain if the CERN management is cautious about the LHC.”
More frequently I’ve heard the opinion that the previous CERN management showed a lack of caution, and that now the LHC is headed on a prudent course. To be fair, the pressure from all sides has been intense, to produce results in the form of papers, theses and press releases.
The present plan of 1/fb at 3.5 TeV seems reasonable. But note that along with the reduced energy, this is well below the design luminosity of 10/fb/year. One should realize that finding the Higgs with only 1/fb of data is unlikely, and that any new results will primarily be more mundane measurements in b quark and t quark physics.
In addition to the other problems, an underlying concern is the unknown effect that prolonged operation will have on the solder connections.
I’ve heard the LHC collaborations will focus on J/Psi physics in their early studies. Yippie, back to Spear circa 1974!
It’s a calibration. When LEP II was pushing to sqrt(s) in excess of open W production, still they stopped at sqrt(s) = M_Z0 first to calibrate the detectors at the start of a run.