First off, we should mention here that CMS’s first paper from collision data has now been accepted for publication by the Journal of High Energy Physics. It’s a measurement of the angular distribution and momentum spectrum of charged particles produced in proton collisions at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV, using about 50,000 collision events recorded in December. It is really wonderful that this result could be turned around so quickly! The first of many papers to come, we hope.
Meanwhile, as already mentioned here, we now have the news of the run plan for the LHC. CERN is preparing for the longest continuous accelerator run of its history, 18 to 24 months. The inverse femtobarn of data to be recorded in that time is a lot, and will give us an opportunity to make many interesting measurements. Whether any of them will be evidence of new physics, I for one am not going to speculate! But if nothing else, this plan sets out what our LHC life for the next ~three years is going to look like.
But a shorter-term question comes to mind — 1 fb-1 over 18 to 24 months is one thing. But what about just the next few months? There is a major international conference coming up in July. What sort of LHC results might be ready by then? That will depend in part on how many collisions are delivered. I’ve seen various estimates for that, but they vary by an order of magnitude depending on the level of optimism, so I’d rather not guess. It will also depend on the experiments’ performance. How efficiently can we record those collisions? How quickly can we process them? How soon will we understand various parts of the detectors well enough to make quality measurements? How smart and clever can we be throughout the entire process? How much sleep is everyone going to get?
Ask me again in July. Meanwhile, game on.
Tags: CMS, first results, LHC, luminosity
Ah yes, all true, but you did not even indicate whether you yourself will be on the optimistic or pessimistic side.
I’m deciding to be optimistic, since recently the LHC as a machine and the CMS detector have exceeded expectations, even the more optimistic ones. Game on, indeed! 
Michael
P.S. I tried to explain a bit about the CMS paper here, in case you would like to add anything.
I think at this point I’m pessimistically optimistic, or optimistically pessimistic. It sure looks like the experiment is in pretty good shape, given how quickly we got that first paper out. Luminosity is largely out of our control, though. I tried going through the exercise of how much data we’d need to do a measurement on the topic I’ve been working on, and I think it’s really going to be on the edge for early data. (The stuff you are probably working on requires less.)
Thanks for posting that link to your discussion of the paper — it is quite thorough, and will be a good read for US LHC blog followers!
I’m going to ask this question anyway, at the risk of sounding like an idiot. Keep in mind I’m just a beginner. But given the evidence of how sub atomic particles work, or even Lack of evidence, doesn’t the process of observing the experiment effect the overall outcome?
Will there be a ramp up period this time aswell? Or will they go straight into 3,5 TeV?
Ron — the short answer is “no.” The longer answer, I think, is that the sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle questions that I think you are raising are minor compared to many other experimental effects involved.
Wallmott — It looks like CERN is going to ramp up the beam energy to 3.5 TeV over the course of a few weeks. I would call that a short ramp-up period, but maybe I’m just a very patient person.
Ron, the uncertainty principle (or at least quantum mechanics) is involved in particle collisions, that is why when you fire protons at each other repeatedly, you get a variety of results (selected randomly from a distribution determined by quantum theory), even if they start from exactly the same relative position and energy. So you are “uncertain” what result you will get. However, the observation of the particles occurs in the large LHC detectors and as such is on a macroscopic scale and doesn’t suffer from this quantum weirdness (the particles could be metres apart when they are going through the detector).
I’m very pleased to see a decision being made as to collect as much data as soon as possible. Whatever will happen to the LHC (think of an accident breaking the machine beyond repair or a global financial meltdown rendering further operation infeasible), the data collected will stay in the archives forever. Although this must be disappointing for some (if i remember correctly, the LHC was once scheduled to run at full power by now), the choice is wise in my opinion. And i sincerely hope that the LHC may surpass our highest expectations one day.