CERN Accelerating science

The CMS detector is a 5 storey-high digital camera recording hundreds of images per second of debris from LHC particle collisions

At about half-past five in the evening on Sunday, 30^th October, an e-mail from Run Coordination to the CMS collaboration said:

Latest news from CERN, the LHC and Heavy Ion collisions ...

Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are analysing the results of their first attempt at colliding protons and lead ions. Further attempts at proton–lead collisions are expected over the next few weeks...

The source of energy for most of the life on our planet originates from proton-proton collisions at the core of the Sun, which occur at an energy (or temperature) about a billion times less than the collision energy of the LHC.

The Large Hadron Collider will spend four weeks probing the conditions of the early universe in better detail than ever before, as it takes a break from the hunt for the Higgs boson...

By combining their data ATLAS and CMS increase their sensitivity in the Higgs boson search

At 17:00 on Sunday 30th October the LHC dumped the last proton beams
for the year to start the machine development period
and to prepare for heavy ion running. This means that we have
come to the end of proton operation for 2011.

Grab a can of soda, shake it thoroughly, and open it up. What do you get? It’s an explosion of fizz. A similar phenomenon in the subatomic world might help us probe the nature of fundamental particles.

The LHC has now delivered 5 inverse femtobarns (fb⁻¹) of data in 2011, of which CMS has collected 4.53 fb⁻¹.