LHC report: xenon in action

Once more, the LHC has revealed a new side to its extraordinary flexibility. So far, collisions of protons, lead nuclei, and protons with lead nuclei have been performed on a regular basis. On Thursday 12 October, a new species joined this particle zoo. Fully stripped xenon (Xe) nuclei were successfully injected into both beam pipes, accelerated and collided for the very first time. This special heavy-ion physics run was added into the schedule just after a high-intensity proton physics fill, and was completed in less than one day. The four LHC experiments collected Xe-Xe collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 5.44 TeV per colliding nucleon pair.