On 16 December 2009, the LHC ends its first full period of operation. Collisions at 2.36 TeV set a new world record and bring to a close a successful first run for the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC is put into standby mode for a short technical stop to prepare for higher energy collisions and the start of the main research programme. Over the 2009 run, each of the LHC’s four major experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb have recorded over one million particle collisions, which are distributed for analysis around the world on the LHC computing grid.