CERN Accelerating science

At about half-past five in the evening on Sunday, 30th October, an e-mail from Run Coordination to the CMS collaboration said: At 17:00 today the LHC dumped the last proton beams for the year to start the machine development period and to prepare…

The LHC has now delivered 5 inverse femtobarns (fb−1) of data in 2011, of which CMS has collected 4.53 fb−1.

The LHC has now delivered over 4 inverse femtobarns (fb−1) of data in 2011, of which CMS has collected 3.7 fb−1.

The number of events that an experiment observes is proportional to a quantity called the luminosity — a measure of how many collisions are occurring in the detector. An accelerator operating at high luminosity stands the best chance of producing…