CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.
24 April 2012
In just three weeks of operation in "stable beams" mode, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already delivered approximately one inverse femtobarn of data to the experiments - a measure of accelerator performance equivalent to 100 trillion proton-proton collisions. Last year, the LHC took three months to reach that amount. Stable beams mode enables the experiments to collect data for physics analysis.
CERN grid computing center
The LHC is now operating at 1380 proton bunches per beam, the maximum value set for this year. It has also exceeded the maximum peak luminosity – a measure of the instantaneous collision rate – achieved last year: while the top value for 2011 was 3.6 × 1033 collisions per square centimetre per second, LHC has now reached 3.9 × 1033 cm-2 s-1.
Cross section of an LHC dipole in the CERN tunnel (click on the image for enlarge)
The higher collision energy of 4 TeV per beam (compared to 3.5 TeV per beam in 2011) and the resulting higher number of collisions expected both enhance the machine's discovery potential considerably, opening up new possibilities for searches for new and heavier particles.
Note:
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.
The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.
More information:
LHC homepage: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
ATLAS: http://atlas.ch/
CMS: http://cms.web.cern.ch/
Images, Text, Credit: CERN.
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