The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has suffered some setbacks in recent months, but they aren’t letting that hold them back:
CERN has announced that the Large Hadron Collider will switch on in May 2008, with collisions at full energy starting in summer 2008.
“We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans.
Of course, they’re currently working to repair a magnet that was damaged during a pressure test, so starting on schedule will mean some corners have to be cut. Specifically, they’re cancelling the “engineering run”:
Although repair of the faulty magnet is currently in progress, CERN spokesperson James Gillies told Physics Web earlier this month that the delay would force CERN to cancel the low-energy “engineering run”, which was scheduled to take place in November. The machine’s operators were planning to use the low-energy run as an opportunity to gain experience steering the protons and detecting collisions before high-energy collisions take place.
They’re just going to turn everything on, and hope for the best. Because that usually works.
Good luck with that.