CERN confirms LHC start-up for 2007
Geneva, Switzerland, June 23: First collisions in
the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) will happen in November 2007, said LHC project leader Lyn Evans at the
137th meeting of the CERN[1] Council held in Geneva today. A two month run in
2007, with beams colliding at an energy of 0.9 TeV will allow the LHC
accelerator and detector teams to run-in their equipment ready for a full 14 TeV
energy run to start in Spring 2008.
The schedule announced today ensures the fastest route to
a high- energy physics run with substantial quantities of data in 2008, while
optimising the commissioning schedules for both the accelerator and the
detectors that will study its particle collisions. It foresees closing the LHC’s
27 km ring in August 2007 for equipment commissioning. Two months of running,
starting in November 2007, will allow the accelerator and detector teams to test
their equipment with low-energy beams. After a winter shutdown in which
commissioning will continue without beam, the high-energy run will begin. Data
collection will continue until a pre-determined amount of data has been
accumulated, allowing the experimental collaborations to announce their first
results.
The LHC project is being closely followed by a machine
advisory committee composed of experts from around the world. This committee
believes that "experience indicates that [the proposed schedule] is the most
efficient way to get to high energy, high luminosity operation at the earliest
date."
Installation of the LHC accelerator has reached full
speed. All of the industrial procurement projects are coming to a conclusion,
and the main technical challenges have been met. Nevertheless, installation
presents its own logistical hurdles that will need to be overcome on the way.
"With a project such as the LHC, there are bound to be
challenges," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, "however, the teams
constructing the LHC and its detectors have risen to meet these challenges in
the past, and I am convinced that they will do so again. We are on the threshold
of a new and exciting era of discovery at the frontiers of particle physics."
