Thanks to a huge collaborative effort the final commissioning of the transfer line TI8 has been successful. There was both excitement and relief as, after some unforeseen delays, the beam burst onto the monitors in the Control Room on Saturday 24th May. Although the beam is less intense (at around 5 thousand million protons per bunch) than will eventually be used in the LHC, this test represents an important milestone in the run-up to the switch-on of the accelerator.

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Thursday 29th May, the cool-down of the final sector (sector 4-5) of LHC has begun, one week after the start of the cool-down of sector 1-2. It will take five weeks for the sectors to be cooled from room temperature to 5 K and a further two weeks to complete the cool down to 1.9 K and the commissioning of cryogenic instrumentation, as well as to fine tune the cryogenic plants and the cooling loops of cryostats.

Nearly a year and half has passed since sector 7-8 was cooled for the first time in January 2007. For Laurent Tavian, AT/CRG Group Leader, reaching the final phase of the cool down is an important milestone, confirming the basic design of the cryogenic system and the ability to operate complete sectors. “All the sectors have to operate at the same time otherwise we cannot inject the beam into the machine. The stability and reliability of the cryogenic system and its utilities are now very important. That will be the new challenge for the coming months,” he explains.

The status of the cool down of all eight sectors can be found at:

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Cooldown_status.htm

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“We are at a point where experiments must guide us, we cannot make progress without them,” explains Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.”

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The current and up to date cooldown status can be viewed in the link below:

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Cooldown_status.htm

The countdown timer was set to the 15th of May because there was no definite time given for the actual activation, recent events show that CERN wont be dividing by zero until much later on in the year, so now the countdown timer will be reset again and will be continually tweaked to go by the latest info that CERN are releasing.

So sorry to disappoint you all, but you wont be dying tomorrow.

On 14 July 1989, the first beam was injected into CERN’s new flagship particle accelerator, LEP, with first collisions coming one month later. Could history be about to repeat itself? As I write this, Sector 5-6 of the LHC has been cooled down, and the sectors between point 1 and point 7 are cooling. Up to now, two sectors have been cooled and warmed up again, but for all the others, the cool-down is definitive.

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300 FEET BELOW MEYRIN, Switzerland — The first thing that gets you is the noise.

Physics, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral pursuit. But this cavern almost measureless to the eye, stuffed as it is with an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metal, eight-story wheels of gold fan-shape boxes, thousands of miles of wire and fat ductlike coils, echoes with the shriek of power tools, the whine of pumps and cranes, beeps and clanks from wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and the occasional falling bolt. It seems no place for the studious.

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Can a seventeen-mile-long collider unlock the universe?

by Elizabeth Kolbert

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has its offices on the outskirts of Geneva, in an area once devoted to dairy farms and now given over to sprawl. The offices occupy several dozen buildings, some of them in Switzerland and the remainder, a few hundred yards away, in France. The buildings are reachable by roads with names like Route Bohr, Route Schrödinger, and Route Curie. By the entrance to the complex, there is a museum—nearly empty the day I visited—that attempts to make particle physics comprehensible to the general public. Behind that there is a park where bits of old cyclotrons are displayed, like playground equipment from Mars.

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May 15, 2007

A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Correction Appended

300 FEET BELOW MEYRIN, Switzerland — The first thing that gets you is the noise.

Physics, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral pursuit. But this cavern almost measureless to the eye, stuffed as it is with an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metal, eight-story wheels of gold fan-shape boxes, thousands of miles of wire and fat ductlike coils, echoes with the shriek of power tools, the whine of pumps and cranes, beeps and clanks from wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and the occasional falling bolt. It seems no place for the studious.

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