Wednesday 10 September 2008
First particles pass through Atlas detector - 2008
Image courtesy of CERN.
At just before 0930 BST this morning the Atlas experiment detected the first clockwise beam to circulate around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. The image shows a visualisation of the detectors in the Atlas experiment registering the passing beam of protons. The first anticlockwise beam completed the 27 kilometer circuit of the LHC at just after 1400 BST and was detected by both the Atlas and CMS experiments. The beams circulated the LHC ring at the 450GeV at which they were injected.
The next steps in the LHC are to operate beams in both directions so that they collide in the experimental detectors, and to accelerate the beams to higher energies so that the effects of the collisions are more dramatic. Once collisions start to occur in the four experiments around the beam, then the detectors will start to generate real data which will be transferred across the world through the World LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) to the 11 Tier 1 sites where it will be stored. As one of these tier 1 sites, STFC e-Science at RAL will store this data, and pass it out through the grid for particle physics (GridPP) to Tier 2 sites in the UK, Ireland, Finland and Estonia for analysis to find new physics results.
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