A word from Lyn Evans:<br/>A sprint to the finish

Most people consider that the starting point for the LHC was a meeting organised by the European Committee for Future Accelerators in Lausanne in March 1984, even though quite a few of us at CERN had already begun work on the design in 1981. Since that time this truly unique machine has moved from a dream to a reality. With its ‘two in one’ magnet structure cooled by superfluid helium for operation at 1.9 K, the LHC is like no other particle collider. In a very real sense, the LHC is its own prototype.

Other colliders have either consisted of two rings to accelerate and store two beams of particles, as in the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) here at CERN, or they have stored particles and their antiparticles travelling in opposite directions with a single ring, as we did with the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. In addition, the LHC is the first accelerator in which the superconducting magnets have been cooled as low as 1.9 K, where helium is superfluid. This is the operating temperature we need if we are to reach the high magnetic field strengths necessary to bend the beams at 7 TeV.

Now for the first time the complete machine is fully loaded with 130 tonnes of liquid helium and the final commissioning of the hardware is progressing apace. Within the coming weeks we should be able to make the first tests with beam in this superb machine.

We all feel as if we are ending a marathon with a sprint. Let’s now bring this machine alive.

Lyn Evans