LHC Report: The switch was flipped, and the beams were dumped
Looking back on an exciting year for the LHC and its injector complex
On Monday, 28 November at 6 o’clock in the morning, the LHC Engineer in Charge flipped the switch and the last proton beams of 2022 made a final turn around the LHC before being discarded into the dedicated beam dumps. This marked the end of the first of four years of Run 3 and the start of the year-end technical stop (YETS), a mere 21 weeks after the very first collision at 6.8 TeV per beam.
2022 was, without a doubt, a commissioning year: our teams encountered problems related to Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) updates, as well as beam intensity limitations due to heat load, in particular in sector 7-8. Thankfully, these issues were effectively addressed, and alternative beam schemes were tested and used to overcome the limitations.