“With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we prepare to launch the physics of the LHC,” said Steve Myers, head of accelerators and Technology. “But we still have much work before obtaining collisions. Align the beam itself is already a challenge: it means just throwing needles across the Atlantic and bring them into collision  mid-term. ”

By 30 March, the team will work with the LHC beams at 3.5 TeV in order to service the systems of control beams and the systems protecting the particle detectors parasites. Before the collisions can occur, these systems must be fully commissioned.

“The LHC is a machine of series,” said Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN. “The machine works well, but we’re still in the process of commissioning, and we must admit that this first attempt of a collision is bel and although an attempt. It will perhaps hours Or even days, for collisions. ”

The last time CERN has triggered a major new research facility, namely Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) in 1989, the first particle collisions were recorded three days after the first crash test.

The current period of operation of the LHC began November 20, 2009, with first beam circulating at 0.45 TeV. The events are then chained quickly: November 23, we circulated the two beams, and November 30, it reached a record global energy beam with 1.18 TeV. Before stopping the LHC from 2009, December 16, another record was achieved with recorded collisions at 2.36 TeV, producing a large amount of data. During the operation in 2009, four major LHC experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, registered over one million particle collisions, the data were distributed smoothly in the world  whole through the grid LHC Computing, for their analysis. The first items of physical did not expect. After a short technical stop, the beams were circulated again February 28, 2010, and the first acceleration up to 3.5 TeV was held March 19.

Once the 7 TeV collisions have been made, it is planned to operate the LHC continuously for a period ranging from 18 to 24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010. We then have sufficient data in all areas where discoveries may be made to uphold the rule of LHC globally in the field of high energy physics.

The first test collisions of protons to 7 TeV will be broadcast on the web day  same. We find more information at: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/