Believe it or not, particle physics has a season, just like baseball. Running a massive particle collider takes a lot of energy, so operators schedule downtime for periods when local energy demand tends to be high. For Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located on Long Island, that means summer air-conditioning season is to be avoided. For CERN's Large Hadron Collider, demand for winter heating is what sets the seasons.
And, as those in the Northern Hemisphere may have noted, the winter is now over. It's particle season again, and today marks the first stable proton beams of 2017 in the LHC.
The 2016/2017 winter break was much shorter than the two-year downtime that saw the LHC upgraded to handle collisions at energies of 13 Tera-electronVolts. Still, the people who run the hardware use the winter breaks to do maintenance and typically some minor upgrades. So, each spring, they go through the process of recommissioning the hardware and making sure it's all working properly before starting any collisions.
The process apparently went smoothly, since the first declaration of stable beams was made earlier today. Befitting the tentative nature of the restart, the beams were relatively small. Each of the collider's two "beams" is actually made of bunches of protons smushed together, and the LHC is capable of handling a beam with over a thousand bunches. Today's beams had only three bunches in each. So, while the LHC's four detectors are taking data, it's only a small amount at the moment; operators will ramp up the number of bunches over the coming weeks.
This year's run will be all about getting the most collisions possible out of the existing hardware. By upping the number of collisions, physicists will have the chance to study the Higgs boson in more detail and thoroughly check out a few hints of odd behavior found in earlier runs. Barring a catastrophic failure, the run will continue all summer and into the autumn.
If you'd like to track what's going on at the LHC in real time, the operators have a constantly updating webpage for you.
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