Accelerator Report: The first stable beams of 2025, a milestone and a beginning
The LHC operations team and many other experts have been working hard to set up and validate the accelerator for safe beam operation, leading to the first stable beams for physics of 2025 on 5 May
Declaring first stable beams marks a major milestone for the LHC and is the culmination of a lot of important work to guarantee safe beam operation in 2025, but it is also the start of another phase in the schedule of the LHC, required to lead into the LHC data-taking season.
The next step is the interleaved beam commissioning and intensity ramp-up phase. In this phase, the number of bunches is increased in stages, while the number of protons per bunch is kept fixed at 160 billion (1.6 x 10¹¹). Initially, individual bunches are injected from the SPS, but the process will soon shift to injecting bunch trains – series of bunches spaced 25 nanoseconds apart – with, finally, 4 x 36 bunches per injection from the SPS. This intensity ramp-up will be interleaved with the remaining commissioning steps that are required to reach the 2460 bunches per beam scheduled for 2025…