Yesterday, the CERN Director-General spoke to the laboratory about the present and future of the laboratory (the slides in English, and video in French, are here). He said a couple of important things.
- Maintenance of infrastructure previously scheduled for the winter shutdown will instead start on Monday, October 6. This means that an effort is being made to re-start the accelerator complex in April instead of the previously scheduled June. That is good news for getting collisions sooner rather than later in 2009. But presumably everything depends on repairs being finished in the LHC.
- Concerning the LHC, a report will be issued before the inauguration on October 21 detailing what happened on September 19, and again presumably will let us know how long repairs are expected to take.
