LHC Status

The installation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is now approaching completion. Almost 1100 of the 1232 main bending magnets are installed and the whole ring will be installed by the end of March 2007. Emphasis is now moving from installation to commissioning, with the cool down of the first of the 8 sectors to liquid helium temperature well underway. In the other sectors, interconnect work is proceeding at a satisfactory pace and will be finished by the end of August. It is foreseen to inject the first beam into the LHC in November with the objective of having first collisions at the injection energy (450 GeV/c) in order to debug the machine and detectors before stopping for the annual winter shutdown. During this time, the detector installation will be finished and the machine will be pushed to full current ready for the first physics run at 7 TeV per beam in 2008.