CERN 23th November 2009: Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC (see below)
The BMBF Research Centre (Forschungsschwerpunkt) FSP-101 “Physics on the TeV Scale with ATLAS at the LHC” is a research network of thirteen German universities and a Max-Planck-Institute.
Associated partners: DESY
The research focus is elementary particle physics carried out at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva with the ATLAS detector.
From 2009 onwards the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers unique possibilities to study the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them at TeV energies which correspond to reactions which have taken place in the early universe at times around 10-12s after the big bang. Studying LHC reactions thus addresses fundamental questions of elementary particle physics and of cosmology.
The LHC collides two very high energy proton beams of 7 TeV head on, producing a centre of mass energy of 14 TeV. The reactions which take place in these collisions are measured with the ATLAS detector which has been built in a large international collaboration to which the institutions of this FSP have substantially contributed.
List and links to the participating institutions
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recent news:
On Friday 20th November 2009 the LHC started again
the operation. Within a short time the operators were able to achieve
stable beam conditions in both directions. To give the experimental
physicists the opportunity to test their detectors the beam was dumped
in the collimator just right before the experiments. The produced
particles produced "Beam-Splash"events which were recorded from all of
the experiments.
Just three days later on Monday 23th November 2009
the next step was reached. Two proton beams circulated in the opposite
direction with a lifetime of 10h. The beams were tuned to produce first collisions in ATLAS and CMS and afterwards
in ALICE and LHC-B, even if the focussing was not optimised and they were successfully recorded in the experiments.
The next steps in the operation of the LHC will be the increasing of
the number of protons for each bunch and the acceleration to higher
energies.
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