Protons Collide At 13 TeV For the First Time At the LHC

An anonymous reader writes to let everyone know the LHC has now smashed protons together at 13 TeV, the highest energy level yet achieved. They've posted the first images captured from the collisions, and explained the testing process as well. Jorg Wenninger of the LHC Operations team says, "When we start to bring the beams into collision at a new energy, they often miss each other. The beams are tiny – only about 20 microns in diameter at 6.5 TeV; more than 10 times smaller than at 450 GeV. So we have to scan around – adjusting the orbit of each beam until collision rates provided by the experiments tell us that they are colliding properly." Spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi adds, "The collisions at 13 TeV will allow us to further test all improvements that have been made to the trigger and reconstruction systems, and check the synchronisation of all the components of our detector."

Comments

Re:Results

[ganjadude]

well this was actually a calibration not a "test". From my understanding to make sure no stray particles are going "off track" they ran this test. So while it is the first time its been run to full power, it wasnt for any reason other than calibration. Now, I dont know if they are collecting and running any data on the collisions that did happen