2012 CMS Luminosity: 10/fb And Counting!
The Large Hadron Collider is delivering as expected a large amount of integrated luminosity of proton-proton collisions to CMS and ATLAS, running at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The total collected in 2012 by CMS has just now crossed the mark of 10 inverse femtobarns: this is twice as much data as that collected in 2011. And the CMS detector is working like a charm, with all subsystems collecting data flawlessly.Physicists need large integrated luminosity to explore rare phenomena, and high energy to probe processes which may only "turn on" above a certain threshold. So given the x2 luminosity so far collected (but we will get to x5 by the end of the year!) and x1.14 energy, the discovery potential of 2012 data is already several times larger than that of 2011 data. read more