LHC breaks the 1 TeV per beam mark

Physics Today : Updated 9:44 EST: The CERN twitter feed reports that both beams at the Large Hadron Collider have passed 1.18 TeV at 00:42 Central European Time on Monday.The LHC is now the highest-energy accelerator in the world, beating Fermilab’s Tevatron collider, which has energies of 0.98 TeV."We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.""I was here 20 years ago when we switched on CERN’s last major particle accelerator, LEP,” said Research and Technology Director Steve Myers. “What took us days or weeks with LEP, we’re doing in hours with the LHC. So far, it all augurs well for a great research program."Next on the LHC’s schedule is increasing the beam intensity and delivering large quantities of proton collision rates to the experiments before Christmas.The current commissioning phase aims to make sure that these higher intensities can be safely handled and that stable conditions can be guaranteed for the experiments during collisions.This phase is estimated to take around a week, after which the LHC will be colliding beams for calibration purposes until the end of the year. Related coverage of the LHC