Successful start for LHC

Everything went just fine: This morning, the first proton beam has been injected in the LHC and has completed its first rounds in the accelerator successfully. The protons raced through the 27-kilometer tunnel at a speed of 0,45 TeV. The proton beam is expected to be accelerated up to 5 TeV in this year. Maximum speed will be 7 TeV, which is about 99,9 per cent of the speed of light (300,000 km/second). Today's commissioning can be seen as the final rehearsal before the first head-on collisions of two counterwise proton beams, planned in around five weeks' time. By proton-proton and other hadronic crashes the LHC simulates the conditions just after the Big Bang. Studying the collision events, physicists hope to solve a number of open issues on their reseach agendas: the detection of the Higgs boson and the confirmation of supersymmetrical particles that are potential candidates for Dark Matter. Furthermore they expect more insights on the substructure of matter.

At Einstein's Kosmos you can read a detailed "eye-witness" report by Dr. Andreas Müller, Scientific Coordinator of the Excellence Cluster Universe.