On Wednesday, the ATLAS collaboration had a meeting to decide what we wanted to request to the Director General (DG) and LHC operations people regarding the initial energy of the first run. After waiting impatiently, we finally got news about the decision from DG Rolf Heuer yesterday evening. You can also read about it more in-depth in Symmetry Magazine.
Apparently the repairs have been going well. The plan is still to start in mid-November. We’ll be running at a Center of Mass energy of 7 TeV (that’s 3.5 TeV per beam). We’ll stay at this energy until we get a significant data sample and the LHC operations team will get experience running the machine.
After this we’ll aim to hit 10 TeV. Hopefully by the end of 2010 we’ll get to heavy ions.
A significant data set means enough collisions to start calibrating the detectors and make sure the machine is operating properly. Keep your fingers crossed and we’ll see what happens.
(Regina Caputo, Stony Brook, NY)
