21 May 2015

UK scientists and engineers are celebrating today at yet another first for the LHC as beams of protons have collided in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the record-breaking design energy of 13 TeV. This is one of the many steps required to prepare the machine before the LHC's second physics run can begin. The LHC Operations team plans to declare "stable beams" in the coming weeks – the signal for the LHC experiments to start taking physics data at this new energy frontier.
"Run 1 of the LHC has been fantastic, but we still have plenty to do in Run 2," said Professor Tara Shears from the University of Liverpool, a leading scientist working on the LHCb experiment. "We're looking for explanations for dark matter, antimatter, even for what sort of Higgs boson we've seen. We know that the Standard Model, our current theory, must break down sometime - I'm really hoping that we see the first cracks with Run 2."

Image: Protons collide at 13 TeV sending showers of particles through the CMS detector.