September 10, 2008—more than 15 years after planning began and 8 years after the start of construction—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began “single beam operation” today. This first stage of operations will culminate in proton-proton collisions at 14 TeV in the center-of-mass, the highest energy particle collisions ever observed and a factor of 7 above the energy of the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, where the highest energy collisions currently take place. University of Illinois faculty Debbie Errede, Steve Errede, Mark Neubauer, and Tony Liss are members of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. After honing their skills for many years at the Tevatron, they are turning their attention to the LHC, where recreating the conditions just moments after the big bang is nearly guaranteed to provide breakthroughs in our understanding of the Universe.
More about the LHC...