Starting beam 2 test
It’s not good enough to have a beam of protons going one way around the accelerator. In order to get collisions, well, you’ve got to have particles coming from the opposite direction. To that end, the guys in the control room have just begun testing beam 2. The sequence is exactly the same as beam 1—the protons will gradually make their way through the eight octants of the machine, one at a time (see below). But they'll go the opposite way.
Hopefully it will go just as smoothly as beam 1 did.
