Click for live LHC Beam Plans.
The LHC team have thankfully created a live status page to show all beam plans for the near future. This is helpful to many of us who want to have some idea of what to expect when we’re on shift “babysitting” our detectors.
You can see at present the main goal is to “complete squeeze to 2m.” This is referring to a measurement (sometimes just called “beta”) that is related of the width of the LHC beam. (It does not mean the beam is 2 meters wide!) Basically, the smaller that number, the narrow the proton beams are at their collision point. This also results in more proton collisions, and more data for the detectors.
I believe the original LHC design was to achieve a squeeze to 0.5 m, so they are well on their way.
Tags: LHC
