LHC, first physics: webcast

The Webcast (click!) began in the morning but it has already ended. Five "TV programs", main and 4 detectors, were available.

The LHC collisions at 2x 3.5 TeV = 7 TeV will start today, on Tuesday, March 30th. A live webcast (schedule) will be aired from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm, Prague Summer Time (2:30 am - 12:00 pm Boston Daylight Saving Time).




Shortly after 8:00 am, new injection of particles began. At 8:30 am, boring speeches by a guy followed. At 8:40 am, energy ramp up to 3.5 TeV started: it takes 30-40 minutes (2 GeV per second or so). The beams disappeared around 8:50 am again (cryogenics problem: magnet protection system caused a quench; correction: the problem was actually due to a magnetic coupling between the SPS main circuit and the LHC). But the actual collisions - and the destruction of the Earth :-) - will begin around 1:00 pm - the delay is because of the lost beams.



This plan worked! Collisions began at 1:06 pm, with stable beams colliding routinely since 1:20 pm or so: press release. The first black hole produced at 12:58:48 pm (see the picture above) was bought by Muammar al-Gaddafi who will use it to erase Switzerland off the map. (This comment of mine was silly enough so that it was retweeted by about 5 other friendly folks.)

Today, the LHC has collected the data from about half a million 7 TeV collisions.

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This is just a tiny reminder that you may want to watch the news on Tuesday. And by the way, I am testing twitterfeed.com - will it send the TRF articles to Twitter? And how will the tweets look like?



LHC news from March 23rd when this posting was approximately posted for the first time.