The first beams were circulated successfully on 10th September 2008. Unfortunately on 19th September a serious fault developed damaging a number of superconducting magnets. The repair will required a long technical intervention which overlaps with the planned winter shutdown. The LHC beam will, therefore, not see beam again before September 2009.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. The LHC is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions are foreseen at an energy of 7 TeV per beam.