Spoilers! It’s LHC Season 2

2015: the year we begin the LHC’s second run, and UNESCO’s International Year of Light. For CERN, these will be the defining themes of the year. When it comes to LHC Run 2, the reasons are clear, and despite the title of this article, it is not within my power to predict what new discoveries may come our way. For the International Year of Light, however, I think I can safely make some predictions.

 

After two years of work, which have been well documented in the pages of the CERN Bulletin, the LHC is well on schedule for the first beams of Run 2 to be circulating in March, with high-energy collisions following in May. By Christmas, the whole machine was at liquid helium temperature, one full sector had been power tested to the equivalent of 13 TeV, and beams had been sent along the transfer lines to knock at the LHC’s door. It promises to be an exciting time, not only for the discovery potential that the extra energy brings, but also for the precision that more data will bring as we further investigate physics such as the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.

At first sight, the International Year of Light may not seem to have very much relevance to CERN, but we are concerned in two very different but equally important ways. Firstly, light beams are not the only ones that carry the property of brilliance: luminosity is also the domain of particle beams and the High Luminosity project is the long-term future of the LHC. This year, an important European Commission-funded component of that project, HiLumi LHC, reaches its conclusion and the project moves on to its implementation phase. In October, we’ll be celebrating that milestone. The other important link we have with the International Year of Light is CESSAMag, another European Commission-supported project, through which CERN is overseeing the construction of the main ring for the SESAME laboratory in Jordan. That project, I’m pleased to say, is also on course, and we will be delivering the main ring components to SESAME later this year, with a view to commissioning in 2016.

Spoilers? Not really, and as many commentators have already pointed out, spoilers don’t really spoil anything. They merely serve to whet the appetite, and in 2015, we’re in for a feast.

Rolf Heuer