CERN sets beam intensity record
Previous record was set by the Tevatron collider in 2010
- Published in News.
Cern’s LHC: Number of particle collisions reaches a new peak
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern has set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 x 1032 cm-2 s-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 x 1032 cm-2 s-1, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2010.
Cern director general Rolf Heuer said the world record marked an important milestone in LHC commissioning. “Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential,” he said.
Luminosity gives a measure of how many collisions are happening in a particle accelerator: the higher the luminosity, the more particles are likely to collide. When looking for rare processes, this is important, said Cern.
Higgs particles, for example, will be produced very rarely if they exist at all, so, for a conclusive discovery or refutation of their existence, a large amount of data is required.
The current LHC run is scheduled to continue to the end of 2012. That will give the experiments time to collect enough data to fully explore the energy range accessible with 3.5 TeV per beam collisions for new physics before preparing the LHC for higher energy running. By the end of the current running period, for example, Cern said it should know whether the Higgs boson exists or not.
After two weeks of preparing the LHC for this new level of beam intensity, the machine is now moving into a phase of continuous physics running scheduled to last until the end of the year. There will then be a short technical stop, before physics running resumes for 2012.