Engineers first circulated a beam around the LHC on 10 September 2008 but , few days later, the machine was heavily damaged when an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel just nine days after it was first launched. During 14 months of repairs dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate particles at the speed of light had to be replaced. This extra year also had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentation and computer software.
Progress on restarting the machine went more quickly than expected on Friday. It was not anticipated that engineers would try to circulate a proton beam until 6am on Saturday at the earliest. However, two stable proton beams had already been circulated in opposite directions around the machine by midnight (GMT) on Friday. Operations team members spent Saturday injecting protons into the LHC's 27km-long "ring", attempting to improve the lifetime of the beams.
Tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN) with all the Magnets and Instuments. The shown part of the tunnel is located under the LHC P8, near the LHCb ( Author: Julian Herzog, Wikipedia Commons)
Engineers had discussed the possibility of attempting to increase the collider's energy to a record-breaking level of 1.2 trillion electron volts this weekend. Only the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago has so far approached this energy, operating at just under one trillion electron volts. Nevertheless, this plan now looks unlikely. Instead, engineers will probably concentrate on preparing the machine for its first low-energy collisions, scheduled to happen in the next 10-15 days.
Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border and operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC is the world's largest machine and will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang. During the experiment, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.
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