[Depfis] PRESS RELEASE : CERN announces start-up date for LHC

[Daniel de Florian]

Geneva, 7 August 2008.

CERN has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in  
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This  
news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle  
accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of  
the start-up will be made available through Eurovision.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing  
beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around  
30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by  
2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that  
would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its  
own prototype.

Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch.  
Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of  
each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the  
electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their  
individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are  
followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector,  
and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to  
operate as a single machine.

By the end of July, this work was approaching completion, with all  
eight sectors at their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above  
absolute zero (-271°C). The next phase in the process is  
synchronization of the LHC with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS)  
accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC’s injector chain.  
Timing between the two machines has to be accurate to within a  
fraction of a nanosecond. A first synchronization test is scheduled  
for the weekend of 9 August, for the clockwise-circulating LHC beam,  
with the second to follow over the coming weeks. Tests will continue  
into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to  
accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the  
target energy for 2008. Force majeure notwithstanding, the LHC will  
see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy  
of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).

Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be  
brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the  
LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking  
particle physics research to a new frontier.

‘We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,’ said LHC project leader  
Lyn Evans.‘It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC  
research programme underway.’

CERN will be issuing regular status updates between now and first  
collisions. Journalists wishing to attend CERN for the first beam on  
10 September must be accredited with the CERN press office. Since  
capacity is limited, priority will be given to news media. The event  
will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed  
through the Eurovision network. Live stand up and playout facilities  
will also be available.

A media centre will be established at the main CERN site, with access  
to the control centres for the accelerator and experiments limited and  
allocated on a first come first served basis. This includes camera  
positions at the CERN Control Centre, from where the LHC is run. Only  
television media will be able to access the CERN Control Centre. No  
underground access will be possible.
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