First full beam cycle at Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Wednesday, September 10th 2008 may be looked back upon as a historic day. On this day, at about 10:25 CEST a huge load was taken off the minds of thousands of physicists. Mission accomplished: a package of protons had gone full circle in the particle accelerator. The time needed for preparation of this experiment was circa one hour. Within this time all of the 8 sectors were engaged and adjusted successively.

Although the particle beam had relatively little energy compared to planned experiments and the beam was only running in one direction, this moment was the first highlight in the nearly 25 years of history of conception, design and construction of the huge Large Hadron Collider. Within the next months, the energy of the beam will be increased little by little and the directly opposed beam will be engaged.

This first “breath” of the LHC was also watched with great interest by the staff of iseg Spezialelektronik GmbH. Our high voltage power supplies, which are used for particle detectors in the three big experiments ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb, now get the possibility to demonstrate their excellence under the proposed conditions.

The two CEO’s and Think Tanks of iseg Spezialelektronik GmbH, Dr. Frank Gleisberg and Dr. Joachim Pöthig, participated in an informative meeting at Technical University of Dresden.
The staff of iseg Spezialelektronik GmbH was watching the live-coverage tensely in our headquarters in Rossendorf, close to Dresden.

Having finished this crucial step successfully, we wish all of the scientists involved the best success and are anxiously awaiting the results!