LHC hits goal of high-energy collisions

After two false starts on Monday morning, Cern physicists achieved their aim of circulating and colliding beams in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV.

Shortly after 1pm in Geneva, the physicists brought both the beams circulating in the particle accelerator into collision. They have already observed these collisions in one of the detector sites, Atlas.

The scientists are stablilising the beam in the three other detectors (Alice, LHCb and CMS) before going ahead with collisions there.

"This is a significant step forward for particle physics and for our knowledge of the early universe," said Cern's director general, Rolf Heuer. "It shows what one can do, and it will show what one can achieve scientifically in bringing knowledge forward."

At the moment, there are not many collisions in Atlas being observed. The next step is to raise the number of collisions, Cern said.

(ZDNet UK staff writer Tom Espiner is in Geneva to report on the 'first physics' experiments in the Large Hadron Collider. I'm posting this blog report for Tom as he's out of reach of an internet connection. )