Large Hadron Collider

News

Timeline

Date	Milestone
September 2012	The LHC has reached a record luminosity of 7.5 * 10³³ and the current data set is four times that accumulated in 2011. The LHC will run until November with proton proton collisions and then switch to heavy ion running through January 2013. The LHC will then shutdown until late 2014 to upgrade the energy by a factor of two. The 2011 and 2012 data will be used to search for new discoveries. These searches include supersymmetric particles, dark matter particles, miniature black holes and evidence for string theory and extra dimensions. The next few years will be truly exciting as the secrets of the Universe are revealed.
July 4th 2012	The discovery of a new particle was announced with a mass over 125 times that of the proton. This particle is believed to be the Higgs particle which was a key missing piece of our current theories. The search for the Higgs has taken almost 50 years. The Higgs field was the mechanism that was proposed to give mass to all particles. The field permeates the whole Universe and as particles experience the field they feel a resistance which we have always called mass. Higgs particles were produced in only one collision out of a trillion (1012) collisions. This was truly the most extreme needle in a haystack problem. see http://cms.web.cern.ch
July 2012	The Large Hadron Collider and the experiments have had a highly successful year and have accumulated more data ever existed and at much higher energies. In addition to the collisions of protons on protons there is an additional program of lead-lead and lead-gold collisions to study the instant just after the Big Bang when all that existed was an extremely hot plasma of quarks and gluons. These two programs, one producing the fundamental building blocks of our Universe and the other examining the environment produced by the Big Bang are elucidating the evolution of our Universe from a billionth of a second after the Big Bang tp 13.7 billion years later.. These results have major astrophysical and cosmological significance.
July 2011	The Large Hadron Collider is exceeding the anticipated performance for 2011. At the end of June the number of LHC experimental collisions exceeded 100 million million, which had been the objective set for the whole of 2011. Use the following links to learn more on the latest LHC and the CMS results being presented at the EPS meeting. http://www.physics.purdue.edu/particle/lhc/news http://cms.web.cern.ch
November 2010	Start of a one month run of lead ion collisions
November 2010	Completion of data taking for proton proton collisions
July 2010	The first extensive physics results from the LHC and the CMS detector were presented at the ICHEP Major International meeting. The results are summarized here.
March 30th, 2010	First collisions at 7 TeV
November 29th, 2009	Collisions at the highest energy ever achieved.
November 23rd, 2009	Beams circulated in the LHC.
September/October 2009	Projected date for first collisions in the LHC
September 19th 2008	An electrical connection failed as current was being increased in the magnets that guide the proton beams. This has required the replacement of 53 magnets and changes to prevent a reoccurrence.
September 10th 2008	First beams were circulated in the LHC

Summary

Shortly after the initial operation of the LHC in September 2008 a serious explosion involving helium gas damaged about 57 LHC magnets. In the intervening year until November 2009 major repairs were made to replace the magnets and to prevent a reoccurrence. On March 30th 2010 the LHC achieved collisions at 7 TeV a factor of 3.5 higher than Fermilab. This is the start of a fantastic era of physics and discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance.

First Collisions

First beam circulated in the Large Hadron Collider on 20 November 2009, and first collisions at 900 GeV (450 GeV per beam) followed on 23 November. The LHC set a world record for beam energy on 29 November, accelerating beams to energies of 1.18 TeV.

On March 30th 2010 the LHC achieved collisions with counter rotating proton beams of 3.5 TeV for a total energy of 7 TeV. This energy is 3.5 times larger than the collisions at Fermilab, the worlds previous highest energy accelerator. The LHC has opened a new energy frontier where major discoveries are expected.

The LHC is expected to run at this energy until the end of 2011. In 2012 upgrades will be made so that in 2013 the energy can be increased to 13 TeV.

LHC on Twitter and YouTube

You can follow the progress of the LHC and interact with the physicists by using twitter and YouTube.

http://www.twitter.com/cern

http://www.youtube.com/cern

In addition the Quantum diaries web site allows you to follow physicists
as they chronicle their lives in real time.

http://www.quantumdiaries.org

The Large Hadron Collider will collide counter rotating beams of protons at the highest energies ever achieved in a controlled experiment. The LHC will explore the physics of the Big Bang and it is expected that major discoveries will occur over the next few years that will result in a new understanding of our Universe and it's evolution. There are a number of puzzles which are expected to be solved. The discovery of the Higgs particle would explain why particles have masses, the discovery of supersymmetry could reveal the origin and constituents of dark matter which accounts for 22% of the Universe and is a critical factor in galaxy formation and our very existence. More exotic discoveries could relate to extra dimensions and the existence of parallel Universes. Miniature black holes could also be produced but would evaporate almost instantaneously ( they will not swallow Switzerland!!).

The Large Hadron Collider was built with a world wide collaboration of tens of thousands of physicists and engineers at a cost of over 10 billion dollars. To detect the products of the collisions requires massive state of the art detectors. The Purdue Particle Physics Group is a major group in the CMS experiment. We have built ,at Purdue, parts of the detector with over 60 million detector elements

This Web site is intended as an introduction to the LHC and CMS for Teachers and High School Students and also provides an opportunity to obtain more information from the Purdue Group by asking questions.

Purdue Physicists working on LHC are Professors Virgil Barnes, Daniela Bortoletto, Art Garfinkel, Laszlo Gutay, Matthew Jones, David Miller, Norbert Neumeister, and Ian Shipsey.
These pages of the Purdue Particle web site were prepared by Professor David Miller and includes material from many of the web sites with links listed on this site.

Purdue University High Energy Physics

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