Yesterday the rumour has been made public: the LHC re-start has been scheduled for next year. Due to the problems that occured recently the needed repairs will take until the common CERN winter shutdown (which will not be cancelled) and therefore the first beam is expected for next year only.
The re-start is planned for early spring now, but what exactly this means is not defined!?
Here’s the official press release.

After the succesfull start on September 10th and some minor issues during the last week the LHC now unfortunately faces it’s first major problem. A “faulty electrical connection between two magnets” in sector 34 seems to be the reason for a possible two months shut down just after the launch. And this now, just at the time I am going down there …
Investigations are still ongoing and the winter shut down is already in question …

Some more details can be found in the official press release.

This weekend, just after the ATLAS Germany meeting, I decided to stay a bit longer in Munich to visit some friends (greets Julia and Christoph), see the city and visit the famous Oktoberfest.

Well … the ATLAS meeting was fine, the meeting of friends was nice, the city was/is okay … just the Oktoberfest turned out to be even more disappointing than expected … just a very big funfair!
Whereas the prices and number of drunk people and the level of drunkenness seems to be connected to this enormous size …

The CERN press release states 10h28 am this morning as the official time for the first LHC beam to make the full turn. Its a big success and the first step towards full operation of the LHC, I guess somewhat next year.

In parallel I was at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Berlin at one of four connected press conferences in Germany that offerer journalists to ask questions about the start-up e.g. to Prof. Dr. Rolf Heuer, the designated general director of CERN.

Also ATLAS made some first measurements with beam on. Some pictures/event displays are linked here:

Some press releases:

• Heise.de (German)
• Heise.de (German)
• Tagesschau.de (German)
• BBC News
• Zoomer.de (German, featuring me in a video sniplet)