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20 August 2012
The Large Hadron Collider (Image: CERN)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has delivered over twice as many collisions to the ATLAS and CMS experiments this year as it did in the whole of 2011.
Last year, ATLAS and CMS each recorded a total of around 5.6 inverse femtobarns of data. This measure of accelerator performance is equivalent to about 560 trillion proton-proton collisions. On 3 August, the LHCb experiment passed the 1 inverse femtobarn mark (100 trillion proton collisions delivered) for this year; ATLAS and CMS passed 10 inverse femtobarns the following day. The LHC is well on its way to its goal of delivering in the order of 1500 trillion proton-proton collisions in 2012.
The LHC is operating at 1380 proton bunches per beam, the maximum value set for this year, with around 1.5 × 1011 protons in each bunch. The accelerator has also far exceeded the best instantaneous collision rate achieved last year: the maximum peak luminosity in 2011 was 3.6 × 1033 collisions per square centimetre per second; the most recent record 7.2 × 1033 cm-2 s-1.
The higher collision energy of 4 TeV per beam this year (compared to 3.5 TeV per beam in 2011) and the resulting higher number of collisions are expected to enhance the machine's discovery potential considerably, opening up further possibilities in the searches for new physics.
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.
Find out more:
The Large Hadron Collider: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/HowLHC-en.html
ATLAS: http://atlas.ch/
CMS: http://cms.web.cern.ch/
LHCb: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/
Image (mentioned), Text, Credit: CERN.
Regards, Orbiter.ch