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

The begining

[coastwalker]

IANA theoretical physicist but...

In six months or so we will know whether there is anything absolutely extraordinary to be learned from the LHC. It is only a hope that new physics will be found at 13TeV. We spent the money to find the Higgs and found it, in the next year or so we will know a lot more about it but the hope is that something of interest to the general public may come out of the energy boost. I would not hold your breath though, so far we have only seen exactly what we expected to see. The next big thing may be to search for the gravitational waves from the big bang to settle the question of whether inflation started the universe. No one is funding it until at least 2035.

Sadly I really think we need to keep our fingers crossed that a mere doubling of energy in the LHC will find anything startling.

Unfortunately we probably need to spend at least as much money on a different experiment to find another amazing thing.

Having said that it is already a triumph to have discovered the Higgs scalar field - something that was only a theory until the LHC came along and now it is in the text books because of it.

You may find that like the moon landing, a tremendous leap forward is followed by 50 years of disappointment once the political will has died. (At least we have transparent aluminum AlN now) :-)