The LHC is restarting

The Large Hadron Collider has been restarted after the Christmas shutdown. The milestone event of the first collisions at 7 TeV on 30 March 2010 was streamed live to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Danish media made an exiting story to the public. Below is an example of the LHC status page (the I's are protons per bunch).

The plans for the coming two years is to cautionaly increase the number of bunches and the squeezing of the beams to bring the luminosity from 10^-28 cm^-2 s^-1 up to values that will allow a total integrated luminosity of 1 fb^-1  by the end of 2011. A long shut-down in 2012 is planned to install new shunts between magnets that will make it safe, even in the case of a quench from the superconducting to the normal state, to raise the energy to 14 TeV.