LHC Pilot Testing after Almost Three-Year Break
On 19 October 2021, at 15:46, a milestone event for the ATLAS collaboration happened after an almost three-year upgrade break ― the first collision events between proton beams and collimators were recorded during the planned testing of the detector and the accelerator in preparation for the 2022 restart.
These events are recorded when the path of particles travelling in the LHC vacuum pipe is intentionally obstructed using collimators – one-metre-long graphite or tungsten jaws that are also used to catch particles that wander too far from the beam centre and to protect the accelerator against unavoidable regular and irregular beam losses.
In the photo: the particles sprayed out of the collision between the beam and the collimators are mostly muons, which hit the detector.
Information and images from the official Instagram account of the ATLAS experiment.
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