Things seems to have been going well at the LHC recently, with the current schedule expecting injection of beams in a little more than two months from now, on Thursday November 19. After that, the plan is for a week and a half of beam commissioning at 450 GeV, and 450 GeV collisions at the beginning of December. The machine will then be ramped up to first 1 TeV, then 3.5 TeV, with 3.5 TeV collisions on December 14. <\/p>\n
Soon after that (December 17), the machine will go into a technical stop period for the holidays, starting back up January 7. From then on, the plan is for a month of more commissioning work and pilot physics. The first regular physics run at 3.5 TeV will last about 3 months, with expected luminosity of 54 pb-1<\/sup>. Then in May, the energy will be increased to somewhere in the range of 4-5 TeV, with a run beginning in June at that energy lasting until mid-October, with expected luminosity of 274 pb-1<\/sup>. The machine will then be reconfigured for a one-month run with heavy ions, and then go into a long shutdown at the end of November.<\/p>\n Anyway, that’s the latest plan, reality may turn out differently. For up to the minute information on how things are going, you can follow along here<\/a>. The last sector to be ready is now supposed to be sector 67, which is in cooldown, the magnets currently around 200K. <\/p>\n See here<\/a> for a recent Science Magazine story on the subject from Adrian Cho.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Things seems to have been going well at the LHC recently, with the current schedule expecting injection of beams in a little more than two months from now, on Thursday November 19. After that, the plan is for a week … Continue reading