Last night the LHC operations team successfully circulated a beam at 6.5 TeV - one of many steps before the LHC can deliver collisions to experiments

Last night the Operations team for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) successfully circulated a beam at 6.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) - one of many steps before the accelerator will deliver collisions at four interaction points within the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb detectors.

The image above shows "LHC page 1"- the status of the accelerator between 10.45pm and 1am last night. The lines on the graph show the intensity of Beam 1 (blue) and Beam 2 (red) as the team injects the beams into the accelerator. The black line shows the energy for Beam 2, which begins to increase at around 12.35am from its injection energy of 450 GeV and ramps to 6.5 TeV (shown as 6500 gigaelectronvolts at the top left of the screen).

Find out more about how the team is preparing the LHC for collisions at 6.5 TeV.