As a day that was anticipated to be a pivotal moment in history, the first beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27km of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10:28AM yesterday.
The historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch, with the events of yesterday seen as something of a date with destiny. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.
The success of Wednesday 10th September puts a tick next to the first of those steps and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be brought into play and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.
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