"Geneva, 25 August 2008. CERN has today announced the success of the
second and final test of the Large Hadron Collider’s beam
synchronization systems which will allow the LHC operations team to
inject the first beam into the LHC.

Friday evening 22 August, a single bunch of a few particles travelled
down the transfer line from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS)
accelerator to the LHC. After a period of optimization, one bunch was
kicked up from the transfer line into the LHC beam pipe and steered
counter-clockwise about 3 kilometres around the LHC.

“Thanks to a fantastic team, both the clock-wise and counter-clockwise
tests went without a hitch. We look forward to a resounding success
when we make our first attempt to send a beam all the way around the
LHC,” said Lyn Evans, LHC Project Leader.

Both the counter-clockwise and clockwise tests are part of the
preparations to ready the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle
accelerator, for the eventual acceleration and collision of two beams
at an energy of 5 TeV per beam. This unprecedented event is foreseen
to take place by end 2008.

Upcoming events marking LHC start-up
10 September: The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be
made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).
This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch,
and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam
for further details.

3 October: CERN will host the LHC Grid Fest, a celebration of the LHC
Computing Grid, a global computing grid designed to handle 15 million
gigabytes of LHC-related data every year. The day will feature
presentations, demonstrations, tours of the CERN Computer Centre and
more. See http://www.cern.ch/lcg/lhcgridfest for more details."

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