It's been at this point before, before the helium leak thing. Let's see them collide beams at energies higher than 1 TeV (which is what I think the highest beam heretofore has been).
We have not yet passed the hamster point!
Proposed schedule says they hope to get there this year:
"Before a brief shutdown of the LHC for Christmas, CERN hopes to boost the energy to 1.2 TeV per beam – exceeding the world's current top collision energies of 1 TeV per beam at the Tevatron accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.
In early 2010, physicists will attempt to ramp up the energy to 3.5 TeV per beam, collect data for a few months at that energy, then push towards 5 TeV per beam in the second half of the year."
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