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13 July 2012
The ATLAS detector at the LHC (Image: CERN)
An important piece of news that almost got lost in the excitement of the Higgs update seminar on 4 July is that the 2012 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proton run is to be extended. On 3 July, a meeting was held between CERN management and representatives from the LHC and experiments to discuss the merits of increasing the data target for this year in the light of the announcement to be made the following day. The conclusion was that an additional seven weeks of running would allow the luminosity goal for the year to be increased from 15 to 20 inverse femtobarns – a measure of accelerator performance equivalent to about 2000 trillion proton collisions – giving the experiments a good supply of data to work on during the LHC's first long shut-down (LS1), and allowing them to make progress in determining the properties of the new particle whose discovery was announced last week.
LHC: The search of the secrets of the Universe
The current LHC schedule foresees proton running reaching a conclusion on 16 October, with a proton-ion run scheduled for November. In the preliminary new schedule, proton running is planned to continue until 16 December, with the proton-ion run starting after the Christmas stop on 18 January and continuing until 10 February. With a final Higgs update for 2012 scheduled to be given to Council during the week of 10 December, an early Christmas present in the form of new insights into the discovery announced last week could be on the cards.
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.
Related link:
Higgs update seminar: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1459565
More information:
LHC homepage: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
ATLAS: http://atlas.ch/
CMS: http://cms.web.cern.ch/
Images, Text, Credit: CERN.
Best regards, Orbiter.ch
