Protons collide with record amount of energy in the LHC

On Wednesday evening, protons with a total energy of 13TeV collided for the first time in CERN’s particle accelerator. The impact test is intended to calibrate the systems designed to protect the machine and detectors from particles straying from the beam.

CERN writes this on its website. The most important part of this first collision phase is the proper setup of the collimators, ie the systems that ensure that the particles that fly in all directions during collisions are absorbed. This way, the teams of the different detectors can be sure that all magnets and detectors are sufficiently protected.

On Sunday, April 5, the first beams shot through the Large Hadron Collider again, after which the first beams of particles at full strength of 6.5 TeV made their rounds on April 10. The first collisions took place on May 5, at an energy of 450GeV. Although the team has already tuned the beams’ trajectories in collisions of 900GeV, as the energy increases, the beams’ characteristics change, changing the location of the collisions. To ensure this is done in a controlled manner, fewer beams are sent through the particle accelerator at a time and the particle beams are concentrated at a smaller point.

Now the search is on for the places where the beams generate the most data. Once those spots are found, the collimators must be positioned so that they absorb all the particles before they hit magnets or detectors. Only then is the machine put into so-called production mode.

At the same time, the large experiments such as Atlas, Alice, CMS and LHCb can use the test data to fine-tune their detectors and experiment further.

It is not yet known when the first results can be expected. It will take a lot of calculations to understand the data coming from the detectors in the coming months.