LHC sets world record beam intensity
Geneva, 22 April 2011. Around midnight this night CERN1’sLarge Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at ahadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 × 1032cm-2s-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 × 1032cm-2s-1,which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’sTevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHCcommissioning.
“Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential.”
Luminositygives a measure of how many collisions are happening in a particleaccelerator: the higher the luminosity, the more particles are likelyto collide. When looking for rare processes, this is important. Higgsparticles, for example, will be produced very rarely if they exist atall, so for a conclusive discovery or refutation of their existence, alarge amount of data is required.
The current LHC run isscheduled to continue to the end of 2012. That will give theexperiments time to collect enough data to fully explore the energyrange accessible with 3.5 TeV per beam collisions for new physicsbefore preparing the LHC for higher energy running. By the end of thecurrent running period, for example, we should know whether the Higgsboson exists or not.
“There’s a great deal of excitement at CERN today,” said CERN’s Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, “and a tangible feeling that we’re on the threshold of new discovery.”
Aftertwo weeks of preparing the LHC for this new level of beam intensity,the machine is now moving in to a phase of continuous physics runningscheduled to last until the end of the year. There will then be a shorttechnical stop, before physics running resumes for 2012.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR02.11E.html |