The Big Bang in Liverpool

Liverpool is currently hosting the 'Big Bang' exhibit which is aimed at making the physics and engineering of the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/) accessible to the general public. From now until 22^nd September this free exhibit will be based at the World Museum in Liverpool .

Over the Summer, members of the Cockcroft Institute are among the volunteers from the High Energy Physics department in Liverpool who are working at the museum to help explain some of the physics behind the world's largest machine to the museum's visitors.

(This calorimeter will measure the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the centre of the detector. Image©CERN)

First protons in the LHC

The LHC first injection test was carried out over the weekend of 9^th-10^th August. The beam was injected at point 2, traversed the ALICE experiment and sector 2-3 and was then dumped on the momentum cleaning collimators at point 3.
Full details, including intensity plots of the first protons in the LHC can be seen at http://lhc-injection-test.web.cern.ch/lhc-injection-test/

This is an important milestone in the commissioning of the LHC machine, and we warmly congratulate our CERN colleagues. The LHC effort at CERN is reinforced by the presence of CI staff Rob Appleby and CI PDRA Federico Roncarolo, who are both based at CERN.