The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will begin colliding high energy proton beams at 7 Trillion electron volts center-of-mass energy on Tuesday, March 30, 9am-6pm Central European Summer Time (CEST). This event will usher in a new era of discovery at the Energy Frontier of Physics with the recording of collision events from our experiment CMS as well as the other experiments ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE.
The Notre Dame High Energy Particle Physics Group invites the Notre Dame campus community to celebrate this seminal event. While the exact timing of initial collisions and the detection of particle interactions is not precisely known, the HEP group intends to be ready for the initial collisions starting at 2:30am South Bend time. This is not a typo, as 8:30am CEST is 2:30am South Bend time! We will be holding our celebration in room 202 Nieuwland Science Hall with monitors showing the latest information from the accelerator and a webcast with CMS.
Notre Dame personnel will be on shift at CMS Centre Control Room during the initial beam operations, so this makes the event even more exciting. Note that this event will run through noon Tuesday South Bend time, so if the early starting hour is not possible for you, feel free to stop by later in the morning.
We look forward to seeing you and sharing our enthusiasm for the wealth of discovery physics to come. Refreshments will be provided.
High Energy Physics CMS Group,
Mike Hildreth, Colin Jessop, Dan Karmgard, Kevin Lannon, Mitch Wayne and Randy Ruchti