Friday, June 17, 2011

LHC Achieves 2011 Luminosity Milestone

A press release from CERN indicates that just today, the LHC has achieved its 2011 milestone for luminosity.

Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments' quest for new physics. The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run. That it has been achieved just three months after the first beams of 2011 is testimony to how well the LHC is running.

In a lot of cases, the LHC is performing better than expected at the current settings. So there is high hopes that they will produce amazing physics (with or without the Higgs), even before the long shutdown next year for the 14 TeV upgrade.

Zz.

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