Welcome back, Large Hadron Collider

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Particles are running again in the Large Hadron Collider! 🙌 Only tests so far, but very important ones to get ready for “real collisions” for actual physics! 👍 And it’s awesome to be here again, after months! “Hello” from the ATLAS control room, while looking at new data!👋

For those who are asking: I’m in a very nice room on the second floor of the ATLAS building, two floors above the actual “control room” 👋

News: we will have new tests tonight, new “beam splashes” from the Large Hadron Collider 💥, this time dedicated to the ATLAS experiment itself! 🙌 I’ll be in the control room tonight, to help with the data visualization!💻 Let’s see what we’ll see! 😃

Coming back to CERN for the “beam splashes”! 👍 Tests start soon… 👌 — But, what’s in the picture? - On the left, the iconic CERN Microcosm, which hosts a public exposition, nice place to visit!👌 - on the right, the ATLAS detector building, where I’m sitting right now 😉

Curios about what the CERN Large Hadron Collider☄️is doing right now? Do you know, you can check the status of it any moment! There’s a public web page, known simply as “LHC Page 1”,showing you the status of the particle beams in LHC in real time!💥 👇 op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/vistars.php

OK! Tests were totally fine! 🙌 LHC created “beam splashes” and we recorded very nice events: the ATLAS detector looks very healthy indeed! 👏 One more step done towards “physics collisions”, where actual physics will be collected and recorded 💥

We produced very nice images of the particles collected tonight during the tests ———> 💥📸 I’ll share them as soon as they’ll be approved by the Collaboration. Stay tuned! 👍😉

Leaving the ATLAS Control Room, now It’s midnight here 🕛 Time to go back home! 😉

And here it is! The fingerprints of the SO MANY particles produced by the “beam splash” tests, the one recorded on Friday night! 🙌

“Beam splash” means the production of A LOT of subatomic particles in all directions💥, used to probe the behavior of the detector. In the image, we see the energy deposited by all the particles in the inner layers of the ATLAS detector (the “calorimeters”) Everything works!🙌

“Collisions expected soon” 💥 …and now, we are close to have “collisions”! The first collisions since end 2018! We are in the ATLAS control room, waiting for the green light🚦from LHC…

The two lines in the graph, one red one blue, show the intensity of the two proton beams circulating in the LHC accelerator Two lines up means “ok, we have beams running, and they definitely have some energy!” Now,the LHC crew is adjusting the beams fit collisions ⚙️💥