![Steve Myers, CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology, congratulates the LHC operators after the first high-energy collisions in the LHC.](https://cern70.cern/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1003061_105-A4-at-144-dpi.jpg)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics programme starts with proton–proton collisions at the unprecedented collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam), recorded by the four largest LHC experiments – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Later in the year, lead ions are delivered to the experiments for the first-ever heavy-ion run at the LHC. Since then, the energy of the LHC collisions has constantly increased to achieve a record-energy of 13.6 TeV in 2022.