LHC's 'Heart' Starts Pumping Protons Before Restart

astroengine writes: While on its long road to restart, yet another milestone was reached at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the weekend. Protons were generated by the LHC's source and blasted through a "daisy-chain" of smaller accelerators before being intentionally smashed into a metaphorical brick wall. The particle beam didn't reach the LHC's famous 17-mile (27-kilometer) accelerator ring — they were stopped just short — but the event was used to begin calibration efforts of the massive experiment's detectors before the whole system is powered back up again early next year. "These initial tests are a milestone for the whole accelerator chain," said the LHC's chief engineer, Reyes Alemany Fernandez. "Not only was this the first time the injection lines have seen beams in over a year, it was also our first opportunity to test the LHC's operation system. We successfully commissioned the LHC's injection and ejection magnets, all without beam in the machine itself."

Comments

Re:Heart starts pumping..

[dbIII]

The experiments break stuff and it takes years to rebuild it.
In a lot of cases that's what science is - a lot of hard work over a long time for a few hours of experiments.

Missing the real news here

[wonkey_monkey]

before being intentionally smashed into a metaphorical brick wall.

Surely the real news here is that they've been able to make functional use of abstract concepts.

Next they'll announce that they've slashed the electricity bill by powering the magnets with love.

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The article could have told us what the protons were actually smashed into, instead...