Beam time

Arret d'urgence

Hey LHC lovers, does something feel freaky déjà vu-ish? Hardware commissioning of the LHC officially completed two days ago. We are on the eve of the first circulating beam. They might even spit some protons around the full ring tonight.  If only this wasn’t so familiar.

I have some sad news: Tom Hanks will not be the master of ceremonies for this show. But, I will give you a few resources with which to bring the party home.  You just need to provide your own big red button and Bosom Buddy. I’m sure it will be awesome. Note: we here at CERN Love take no responsibility for what you do with this information.

LHC information

• Commission schedule and updates
• News
• Monitoring – these are the high level monitoring screens that you might see around CERN.  Be sure to try all the options in the top-left pull-down menu; if you like obscure acronyms, colored indicators, and mysterious plots then you will be in heaven.
  • General machine status
  • Cryogentics
  • Physics operation
• Cryogenics history (buttons on top select a sector with more details, buttons on bottom select time frame)
• CERN on Twitter

CMS beam splash event 2009-11-20 18:12:05

Experiment information

The reality is that the LHC experiments won’t be pushing to the frontier of knowledge, let alone creating wormhole portals to alternate dimensions, for at least another year. For now the goal is just to test what we can of the detectors and hopefully create some dramatic renderings usings beam splash or beam halo events (hopefully updated soon).

• LHCb public web page – detector status (try Page1 or LHC status)
• Alice public web page – detector status
• ATLAS public web page with detector status and live events — web cams
• CMS  public web page — web cams — twitter

Updates: removed ATLAS live event link (it seems you need a login now), added twitter links, added cryogenics link, added CMS beam splash image.