We are all getting anxious for particle collisions (see here and here).
I know the time must be getting near since I have recently received a few emails about parties to celebrate the start-up. There will be one for ATLAS October 4, and one for the LHC the evening of October 21. That one follows the VVIP CERN event earlier in the day.
But we still don’t know exactly when we will have beam in the LHC. The last update I saw said that there won’t be circulating beam in the LHC before September. Collisions are expected to be 1-2 months behind that. The LHC will shut down for the winter in December. So it is getting tight, but even a few weeks of collision data this year will keep us busy for a while as we can use the data to calibrate the detector, and find and fix problems.
The next big clue as to when we will see protons will be when the experiments are given the official 4-week notice. Then we will know exactly when beam will come to ATLAS. That will also trigger ATLAS to start staffing the control room 24 hours a day (overnight shifts, here we come!). Right now we are only taking shifts during the day and evening, mainly on the weekends.
Speaking of shifts, here is a picture of the online shift booking system:
Not only the crew from the LHC and particle physicists around the world are holding their breath while waiting for the first colisions. I get often frustrated everytime I hear a new “switch on” date. I’m particularly excited about the Higgs (as well as the black hole that’s going to suck us all up…)
By the way, I’m a physics student in Lisbon, Portugal.
I find this blog a very useful tool to getting info on the latest progresses.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Luis,
The thing to remember is that nobody’s ever built an LHC before, so everything the machine people do is being done for the first time. That means we can almost expect that unexpected things will go wrong, or take more time than we thought, and that means that the best-guess schedule can change. The good news is that the closer we get, the better we know how things are going, and the smaller the delays (if any) will be. Try not to be too frustrated!
When the LHC uses that much Helium and Nitrogen, does it mean we’ve no chance of aquiring such in any amount?
In case of the chance we see Hadrons imploding, please forward all manner of similar discourse to your nearest Box, which will then be used in case there’s that occurence complying.
[...] of particles in a month or so. No collisions are going to be happening until later in the fall, the LHC blog mentions. And blah blah blah on and on I went. The biggest machine ever built to study the smallest things [...]