Screen shot of the last proton beam being dumped.
Geneva, 17 December 2012. This morning CERN completed the first LHC proton run. The remarkable first three-year run of the world's most powerful particle accelerator was crowned by a new performance milestone. The space between proton bunches in the beams was halved to further increase beam intensity. "This new achievement augurs well for the next LHC run starting in 2015," said CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers, "High intensity beams are vital for the success of the LHC programme. More intense beams mean more collisions and a better chance of observing rare phenomena." To put this into context, of the 6 million billion proton-proton collisions generated by the LHC, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have each recorded around 5 billion collisions of interest over the last three years. Of these, only around 400 produced results compatible with the Higgs-like particle whose discovery was announced in July.
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