Left to Right: CMS and ATLAS had more collisions yesterday.

After over a year of down time, the Large Hadron Collider restarted late last month. Within days, it surpassed the Tevatron and became the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world.

But highest-energy does not equal most powerful. Although the LHC has successfully accelerated protons to 1.18 TeV, the overall number of it’s smashed is tiny.

The ATLAS detector has a nice dashboard on its website, which sums things up rather well. In about a week, the detector has recorded 226 collisions. When the LHC is running at full strength, it will be producing 600 million collisions per second. To achieve that incredible collision rate, the LHC will circulate and smash 5616 tightly packed proton bunches. As of this weekend they’ve gotten up to eight.

There’s good reason for starting off slow. Last year, the machine blew out a connection in one of its superconducting cables. The resulting electrical arc vapourized several tons of liquid helium used to cool the cable, and caused a massive amount of damage. The full-power beam, when it’s commissioned, will carry as much energy as an aircraft carrier moving at 12 knots. If they loose that beam for any reason, then the mess they will have on their hands would make last year’s catastrophe look like a blown fuse.

Needless to say things will move slowly for the moment. But by the winter break, which starts on the 18th, CERN physicists hope to have a good amount of experience running the accelerator. That should allow them to move on quickly to higher energies (and powers) early next year.

Credit: CMS/ATLAS