CERN sees first beam!

Here is a snapshot of this morning's first circulating test beam in the LHC accelerator. This "picture" was captured by the ATLAS detector, one of two general purpose particle physics detectors poised for data collection at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Represented in these diagrams are millions of muons captured by the detector after the beam was diverted into a collimator.


First LHC test beam captured by the ATLAS detector.

Since beam was only circling in one direction, no collisions occurred. That will happen later this fall. Everything looks good for the startup of the next era of particle physics!

Check out Google's way of celebrating the achievement;