LHC: Two more days before the first beam

Following a number of last functional and safety tests in the past weeks, the launch of the first proton beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is approaching fast. The start-up date for the first circulating proton beam to be injected into the 27 kilometer accelerator is 10 September 2008. The start energy for the first beam will be 450 GeV. The event will be webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch/. Once stable circulating proton beams have been established, they will brought into collision. The final step will be to commission the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine. In the LHC, two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.