Large Hadron Collider - Tests Still Going Well

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, passed one milestone last Friday, and seems ready for another on September 10, 2008.

• "Large Hadron Collider: Final Synchronization Test A Success"
  ScienceDaily.com (August 26, 2008)
  • "ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2008) — CERN has announced the success of the second and final test of the Large Hadron Collider’s beam synchronization systems. The test will allow the LHC operations team to inject the first beam into the LHC.
  • "Friday evening (August 22, 2008), a single bunch of a few particles travelled down the transfer line from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator to the LHC. After a period of optimization, one bunch was kicked up from the transfer line into the LHC beam pipe and steered counter-clockwise about 3 kilometres around the LHC...."
  • "...10 September: The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam for further details...."
• "CERN announces start-up date for LHC"
  CERN press release (August 7, 2008)
  • "Geneva, 7 August 2008. CERN1 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...."

That "cool down phase" is a bit of an understatement, I think. The operating temperature of parts of the Large Hadron Collider is 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C).

This sort of installation was the stuff of science fiction stories when I was growing up. It's exciting, living in a world where robot spaceships explore the planets, while physicists study the structure of matter with a vast device built under two nations.

I've been following CERN's LHC for a while now:

• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider: the Proton Beam Failsafe "
  (August 22, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - the Countdown Continues "
  (July 6, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - Huge Research Tool "
  (June 28, 2008)
• "CERN Large Hadron Collider: Photos "
  (March 20, 2008)
• "Photos of Five Cool Research Facilities"
  (January 5, 2008)

More:

• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider: A List of Posts "