Large Hadron Collider achieves 2011 data milestone
Sunday, June 19, 2011 - 14:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by Large Hadron Collider experiments ATLAS and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments' quest for new physics. The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million (70 x 1012) collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run. That it has been achieved just three months after the first beams of 2011 is testimony to how well the LHC is running.