3 June 2015
LHC Season 2: VNR
CERN, Geneva.
Speech in English and some natural sound
Abstract and resources:
LHC experiments are back in business at a new record energy
Today, CERN's [1] Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started delivering physics data for the first time in 27 months. After an almost two year shutdown and several months re-commissioning, the LHC is now providing collisions to all of its experiments at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, almost double the collision energy of its first run. This marks the start of season 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new discoveries. The LHC will now run round the clock for the next three years.
Today at 10:40am, the LHC operators declared “stable beams”, the signal for the LHC experiments that they can start taking data. Beams are made of “trains” of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC. These so-called bunch trains circulate in opposite directions, guided by powerful superconducting magnets. Today the LHC was filled with 6 bunches each containing around 100 billion protons. This rate will be progressively increased as the run goes on to 2808
bunches per beam, allowing the LHC to produce up to 1 billion collisions
per second [2].
During the first run of the LHC, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the so-called Higgs boson, which was the last piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model, a theory that describes the
fundamental particles from which everything visible in the universe is made, along with interactions at work between them.
With run 2 starting today, physicists have the ambition to further explore the Standard Model and even to find evidence of new physics phenomena beyond its boundaries, which could explain remaining mysteries such as
dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe, or nature's apparent preference for matter over antimatter, without which we would not exist [3].
Over the two-year shutdown, the four large experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb also went through an important programme of maintenance and improvements in preparation for the new energy frontier [4].
In addition to these large collaborations, three smaller experiments --- TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL --- will be among those searching for new physics at the LHC's new energy frontier of 13 TeV [5].
Resources:
For images, videos and webcast, please see:
1) About CERN: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession. Serbia is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership.
India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Union, JINR and UNESCO have Observer Status.
2) See 'LHC Season 2: facts & figures :
3) See LHC Season 2: New frontiers in physics :
4) See LHC Season 2: Major work at the experiments for Run 2 :
5) Smaller LHC collaborations to analyse collisions at 13 TeV :
1 LHC Season 2
Shotlist – A-roll
00.00.00 The LHC “page 1” screen shows the status of the machine as the beam energy ramps through about 1850 GeV (1.85 TeV)
00.03.14 Director for Accelerators and Technology, FrédérickBordry, in the CERN Control Centre, describes the next steps from ramp to collisions.
00.09.02 Screen showing the end of ramp as the beam energy reaches 6.5 TeV
00.12.19 Screen showing the “squeeze” where the sizes of the beams are reduced to increase the density of particles in the collisions
00.16.08 Screen showing the two beams – the two small bright dots (top) – and their profiles.
00.19.20 Collision event in the ATLAS detector being displayed in the ATLAS control room
00.23.18 Collision event in the CMS detector.
00.30.03 Collision event in ALICE detector.
00.35.14 Collision event in LHCb detector.
00.40.04 Applause in CERN Control Centre as stable beams are achieved in the Large Hadron Collider at a new record energy of 13 TeV (10.40 am)
00.46.17 Director-General Rolf Heuer in the CCC expresses his emotion.
00.51.23 Giulia Papotti, engineer in charge on shift this morning, confirms that the LHC is back in business.
00.54.12 Head of Beams Department, Paul Collier, expresses his pleasure at reaching this stage.
01.09.07 Director for Accelerators FrédérickBordry expresses his enthusiasm for the start of the second physics run of the LHC.
01.23.01 Reaction shots in the CERN Control Centre
01.26.17 Reaction shots in the CERN Control Centre
01.30.09 General view of the ALICE Run Control Centre
01.35.13 Screen showing scenes from the four experiments.From top left to bottom right: LHCb, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS.
01.41.14Applause in the ATLAS control room
01.47.18 Director for Research and Computing Sergio Bertolucci expresses his enthusiasm and says that CERN is now ready to start a new phase of exploration.
01.58.13 Reaction shots in the CERN Control Centre
02.03.01 ATLAS control room fading into DG who expresses his thoughts on this fantastic “moment”.
02.09.23 Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General elect, addresses the importance of this high-energy run for particle physics
02.18.07LHCb experiment deputy run-coordinator Federico Alessio in the LHCb control room
02.23.07 ATLAS experiment spokesperson Dave Charlton in the ATLAS control room
02.35.12 CMS experiment spokesperson TizianoCamporesi in the CMS control room
02.43.10 ALICE experiments spokesperson Paulo Giubelino in the ATLAS control room
A-roll Ends
B-roll starts
03.10
Annotated animation: An introduction to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It follows the journey of protons, from where they start in a bottle of hydrogen gas, through the various steps in the accelerator chain where they increase in energy, until they reach the LHC where two beams of protons are accelerated and then made to collide. The collisions occur at four points around the LHC at the centre of four big detectors: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Each collision produces hundreds of particles that leave tracks in the detectors, creating a huge stream of data the computing grid distributes around the world for analysis. The analyses reconstruct the most interesting collisions and slowly build up information in graphs that reveal the underlying physics – such as the production of the particle known as the Higgs boson.
05.40
Annotated animation. Proton bunches in the LHC collide to form a Higgs boson, which immediately decays (changes) into particles that leave a distinctive pattern of tracks in a detector
05.46
Scenes, with sound, from CERN on the day of the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson at the LHC, 4 July 2012, with Peter Higgs (wearing glasses).
06:00
Annotated animation showing how an LHC radiofrequency cavity works. Particles make 11,245 turns per second in the LHC. Every time a particle has made a turn in the LHC, it passes by a region where it is accelerated by electric fields. These fields are produced inside a so-called “Radiofrequency Cavity”. Inside the cavity, the direction of the field oscillates between positive (red) and negative (blue) voltage, so that the incoming particles always see an accelerating electric field.
06.16
Annotated animation showing how an LHC dipole magnet works. Two particle beams circulate in the LHC, in opposite directions. To keep them on their circular track, their trajectories have to bent using magnetic fields. The field is generated by two coils producing fields pointing in opposite directions for the two counter-rotating beams. The coils are cooled to -271.2 degrees Celsius so they become superconducting and when the LHC is operating at energy of 6.5 TeV per beam, a current of nearly 11,000 amps flows through them without any resistance, generating a magnetic field of 7.8 tesla. Each dipole magnet deflects the path by only 0.3 degrees, and about 1200 dipole magnets are needed to bend the beams around the 27-km circle of the LHC.
07.07
Annotated animation showing how an LHC collimator works. Individual particles from each beam can stray off their foreseen path and hit the beam pipe or even the inner part of a detector. Therefore, the beam has to be ‘cleaned’ from these stray particles before coming close to the collision regions. Before each experiment, there are devices called collimators to do do this job. By moving two absorber plates close to each other, only the central part of each beam (with a diameter of about 1 mm) manages to get through, while the stray particles are absorbed.
07.22
Annotated animation. The LHC beam is formed of many bunches of particles (up to 2808), each measuring a few centimetres long and a millimetre wide. Their width is smaller than the size of Spain on a 1 Euro coin. However, the bunch size is not constant around the ring. Each bunch, as it circulates around the LHC, gets squeezed and expanded. It gets squeezed as much as possible around the interaction points to increase the probability of a collision. As they approach the collision points, they are squeezed to about 16 micrometers (a human hair is about 50 micrometers thick) to allow for a greater chance of collisions.
07.45
Animation showing the squeezing of the LHC beams as they collide together.
07.57
Footage of ATLAS detector during LS1
08.44
Footage of the ALICE detector during LS1
09.29
Footage inside the LHC tunnel, including the 15-m long blue tubes containing the dipole magnets.
09.44
Footage of the CMS detector during the LS1
10.12
Footage of the LHCb detector during the LS1
10.26
Footage inside the tunnel of the Super Proton Synchtron (SPS) - the last step in acceleration before the LHC.
10.47
Animation created of an actual collision event recorded in ATLAS in 2010. It shows the race through the LHC, ending in the detector where the particle collision occurs, creating a Z boson that decays to two muons.
11.41
Animation of three quarks held together by gluons to make a proton
11.55
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Installing shunts to provide an alternate pathway for the 11,000-amp current to safely pass from magnet to magnet in the event of a fault. (Some background noise.)
12.17
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Installing pressure relief devices. (Some background noise.)
12.29
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Insulating spoolpieces. (Some background noise.)
12.38
Work during the 2-year long shutdown. Insulating busbars. (Some background noise.)
13.07
Scientists talking (in various languages) about their expectations for Run 2 of the LHC. In order of appearance:
Patrick Koppenburg
Claire Lee
Rebeca GonzalezSuarez
Barbara Storaci
Mateusz Ploskon
Mike Flowerdew
Claire Lee
Freya Blekman
Mika Vesterinen
13.36
General aerial footage of the CERN site from the Globe of Science and Innovation.
Issued by the CERN Press Office.
CERN Press Office
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