With lots of excitement surrounding the ramping of the LHC to 3.5 TeV with their beams as reported on here by Symmetry Magazine and the upcoming collisions @ 7 TeV from the LHC it is easy to overlook something of reported by the Tevatron via Twitter and Facebook
Tevatron Store 7682 terminated intentionally – delivered 8200 nb^-1. Store 7685 is now colliding with RECORD initial luminosity = 371 ub^-1/s!
This number was later amended by Ron Moore to report that it was actually 376 ub^-1/s a truly amazing feat. After more than 25 years of colliding, tuning, and learning the Tevatron is performing better than it ever has! Even more so, it is doing this with protons and anti-protons, as anyone in the accelerator world will tell you achieving these kind of initial luminosities were once thought very hard impossible with anti-protons.
As a person working on CDF (Collider Detection at Fermilab) I am very excited to see that our European counter parts are coming along and shattering world records and getting ready to push out the next era of physics. However, I can’t help but love to hear the news that the Tevatron is doing what it does, what it has done, and what it will continue to do…namely producing some of the best particle physics data in the game!
Thanks to all those in the accelerator world for making such valuable data for us to analyze!
