It has been a very exciting weekend with proton beams in the LHC day and night, but it was still only the warmup. Now we are eagerly awaiting the first collisions. Then we will really have begun the LHC era.
But we are not just sitting and waiting for collisions. I have spent most of the weekend looking at the data collected so far, and based on the email traffic so have many others. My conclusion is that the ATLAS detector is performing extremely well.
Besides the quality, what has impressed me is how quickly the data has been made available around the world, and how well all the software to analyze it has worked. This is not a big surprise to me since these are some of the things we have used the last year to improve, but it is nice to see it all work so well.
Just in case you haven’t seen them, teams have been scanning the data and making event displays.
Now that the LHC and the detectors have done everything that was done last year (and more), we can finally move on to what we have really been waiting for, collisions!
