The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is officially entering a new stage. Today, a ground-breaking ceremony at CERN celebrates the start of the civil-engineering work for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC): a new milestone in CERN’s history.

As I write this report, the integrated luminosity counter for ATLAS and CMS is at 23.1 fb-1, exceeding our goal of around 18 fb-1

The LHC is in full production mode with 2556 bunches per beam and has already successfully provided 14.6 fb-1 to each of ATLAS and CMS

On 5 May, the last step in the intensity ramp-up process was completed, ten days ahead of schedule. The LHC is now filled with 2556 bunches per beam

Some 500 scientists from 147 institutes met in Amsterdam for the 2018 Future Circular Collider (FCC) week from 9 to 13 April

On 28 April 2018, 13 days ahead of schedule, the operators of the LHC successfully injected 1200 bunches of protons into the machine and collided them

The LHC operators hope to break last year’s record for total proton-proton collisions delivered to the experiments

Experiments resume at CERN’s second-largest accelerator, the Super Proton Synchrotron

Beams were circulating in the LHC by 30 March (five days in advance!), and everything is looking good for a strong final year of LHC Run II.