The Acceleration of Protons in the Large Hadron Collider

When the beam is injected into the LHC, the beam is traveling at about around 15% of its maximum energy. So once you actually have them stored, as we say, and in collision, then they remain in collision for five to ten hours. And then we dump the beam and we start again with a new set of protons. There's a lifetime for the beam, which is of order around ten to fifteen hours.