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12 April 2012
Image above: A physicist monitors beams in the LHC from the CERN Control Centre (Image: CERN, from the 2011 lead-ion run).
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumed operating in "stable beams" mode at 00:38 CEST on 5 April, and is rapidly coming back up to speed. The LHC experiments need stable beams to collect data for physics analysis.
In its first 6 days of operation this year, the LHC has already reached a total integrated luminosity of 0.2 inverse femtobarns – a measure of accelerator performance equivalent to about 20 trillion collisions delivered to the experiments. Last year the LHC took six weeks achieve the same number.
The number of proton bunches in the machine – currently 624 per beam - will be increased over the coming two weeks, to 840, then 1092, and finally to 1380 bunches per beam, the machine's maximum for this year. The number of protons per bunch is also increasing.
LHC - CERN
This year's 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 enhance the machine's discovery potential considerably, opening up new possibilities for searches for new and heavier particles. Watch this space!
Note:
1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
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Images, Text, Credit: CERN.
Cheers, Orbiter.ch
