News From CERN and Fermilab
Things have been going quite well recently at the LHC, with cooldown beginning now for the last two sectors of the ring, three sectors cool, and three cooling. The latest cooldown schedule is here, a report yesterday on progress here. Sometime in July the beam commissioning process should begin, with the current plan to inject first particles in late July. About 2 months should be needed to get to first collisions at 10 TeV and the possibility of starting to take some data. The LHC has to have a winter shutdown so that the residents of Geneva don’t freeze to death, and that will start in late November. Estimates are that the fall 10 TeV run will produce total luminosity of “tens of pb-1“. Tommaso Dorigo predicts 40 pb-1, see more here. Also, don’t miss his series of recent posts from PPC 2008 giving the best blogging from a conference I’ve ever seen… The plan for 2009 is to run at 14 TeV, with perhaps 2.5 fb-1.
Read more here.
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