The Large Hadron Collider

21 March 1984
A Large Hadron Collider in the LEP Tunnel?

CERN and the European Committee for Future…
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30 January 1987
US president announces support for Superconducting Super Collider

With US President Ronald Reagan’s support,…
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01 October 1992
ATLAS and CMS collaborations publish letters of intent

The Toroidal LHC Apparatus collaboration propose…
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01 March 1993
ALICE collaboration publishes letter of intent

The collaboration for A Large Ion Collider…
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21 October 1993
Superconducting Super Collider project cancelled

Due to concerns linked to rising costs, the US…
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14 April 1994
10-metre magnet prototype achieves 8.73 Tesla

The first prototype bending-magnet for the LHC…
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16 December 1994
LHC construction approved

The CERN council approves the construction of the…
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23 June 1995
Japan admitted as CERN observer state

The CERN Council admits Japan as an observer…
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20 October 1995
LHC Conceptual Design Report published

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project is…
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31 January 1997
CMS and ATLAS experiments approved

Four years after the first technical proposals,…
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14 February 1997
ALICE experiment approved

The CERN research board officially approves the…
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15 August 1997
TOTEM collaboration publishes letter of intent

The Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering…
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19 December 1997
United States admitted as CERN observer state

At the December session of the CERN council,…
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15 February 1998
MoEDAL collaboration publishes letter of intent

The Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC…
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10 July 1998
Gallo-Roman ruins discovered at CMS dig site

As construction workers are preparing the work…
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17 September 1998
LHCb experiment approved

LHCb is the fourth experiment approved for the…
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31 May 2002
Final excavation of the ATLAS cavern

A digger removes the final sods of earth from the…
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05 July 2002
Reinforcing the ATLAS cavern floor

Construction workers use a modified cement truck…
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04 June 2003
ATLAS cavern inaugurated

After three years of work, the ATLAS detector…
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05 November 2003
LHCf submits letter of intent

The LHC forward collaboration proposes to build…
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01 February 2005
CMS cavern inaugurated

After six and a half years of work, CERN leaders…
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26 April 2007
Last LHC dipole magnet goes underground

The last superconducting magnet is lowered down…
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29 February 2008
Final large detector piece lowered into ATLAS cavern

A component known as a small wheel is the last…
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23 July 2008
Final large detector piece lowered into CMS cavern

The pixel detector barrel is the last large piece…
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10 September 2008
The LHC starts up

At 10.28am on 10 September 2008 a beam of protons…
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19 September 2008
Incident at the LHC

On 19 September 2008, during powering tests of…
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21 October 2008
Inauguration of the LHC

In line with Japanese tradition, this Daruma doll…
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30 April 2009
Final magnet goes underground after LHC repair

The 53rd and final replacement magnet for the…
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20 November 2009
Beams back in the LHC

From a CERN press release, dated 20 November 2009…
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16 December 2009
The LHC is put into standby mode

On 16 December 2009, the LHC ends its first full…
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28 February 2010
The LHC starts again after a short technical stop

After a short technical stop, beams circulate…
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30 March 2010
First LHC collisions at 7 TeV

ATLAS records collisions at 7 TeV centre-of-mass…
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18 October 2011
LHC proton run for 2011 reaches successful conclusion

On 18 October 2011, the grand total of data…
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13 December 2011
Tantalising hints of the Higgs

In a seminar today the ATLAS and CMS experiments…
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05 April 2012
Record collision energy of 8TeV

(image: event recorded with the CMS detector in…
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04 July 2012
ATLAS and CMS observe a particle consistent with the Higgs boson

On 4 July 2012, as a curtain raiser to the year…
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16 February 2013
End of LHC Run 1: First shutdown begins

On Saturday 16 February at 8.25am the shift crew…
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08 October 2013
François Englert and Peter W. Higgs awarded 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics

François Englert (left) and Peter Higgs at CERN…
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12 December 2014
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider gears up for run 2

Run 2 of the LHC follows a 2-year technical stop…
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13 May 2015
CMS and LHCb experiments reveal decay of the B0s particle into two muon particles

Published in Nature, the CMS and LHCb…
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03 June 2015
LHC experiments back in business at record energy of 13 TeV

From an update on the CERN website: The Large…
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Magnetic monopoles and dipoles (Image: CERN) (Image: CERN)

10 August 2016
The LHC MoEDAL experiment publishes its first paper on its search for magnetic monopoles

In a paper published by the journal JHEP, the…
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As the number of particles produced in proton collisions (the blue lines) increase, the more of these so-called strange hadrons are seen (as shown by the red squares in the graph). (Image: CERN) (Image: CERN)

24 April 2017
ALICE experiment results show novel phenomena in proton collisions

In a paper published in Nature Physics, the ALICE…
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06 July 2017
The LHCb experiment is charmed to announce observation of a new particle with two heavy quarks

At the EPS Conference on High Energy Physics in…
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