Switched on!

Like a star arriving on stage, impatiently followed by each member of CERN personnel and by millions of eyes around the world, the first beam of protons has circulated in the LHC. After years in the making and months of increasing anticipation, today the work of hundreds of people has borne fruit. WELL DONE to all!

Successfully steered around the 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10:28 this morning, this first beam of protons circulating in the ring marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. "It’s a fantastic moment," said the LHC project leader Lyn Evans, "we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe".

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be introduced, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.

"The LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, "its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself."

Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton’s description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature’s preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.

Born in the minds of a few pioneers and dreamt of by a large community of physicists, as of today the LHC is a reality.