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| Physicist Despina Hatzifotiadou inspects the wiring on the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (Image: CERN) |
In just 12 days of operation in "stable beams" mode, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already exceeded the maximum peak luminosity – a measure of the instantaneous collision rate – achieved last year. The LHC has now reached 3.9 × 1033 collisions per square centimetre per second, while the top value for last year was 3.6 × 1033 cm-2 s-1. Stable beams mode enables the experiments to collect data for physics analysis.
So far this year the total amount of data delivered to the experiments – the integrated luminosity – is now about 0.6 inverse femtobarn, a measure of accelerator performance equivalent to about 60 trillion collisions. Last year, it took about 12 weeks of operation to reach that number.
The number of proton bunches colliding in the machine is steadily increasing, with 1092 bunches per beam achieved so far. Over the coming days, this number will be increased to 1380 bunches per beam, the maximum value for this year.
This year, 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. So keep an eye on us!
Source: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/
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