Today will be a busy day at CERN, with beams scheduled to go around the Large Hadron Collider tunnel, a big step towards the start of “Run 3”. This comes after a long, three year shutdown where, while struggling with challenges from COVID and the invasion of one of our associate member states by a (now suspended) observer state, a series of upgrades and maintenance tasks have been carried out on the accelerator and the experiments.

You can read some articles about it, with nice quotes from colleagues, here and here for example. And for a while at least you can hear me talking about it with Rick Edwards and Rachel Burden on BBC 5 Live Breakfast (just before 7am).

There’ll be no new collisions today, they should come in June, with the new (slightly) higher energy collisions targetted for July. You can see the long-term schedule here, and we’re still in the orange. Green is where the physics really happens.

But the machine is alive again, and it’s good.