Stable proton beams colliding at some of the highest luminosities reached by the LHC so far!
Right now the luminosity is at 1030/cm2s. Up until now, the luminosity collected these past few months has been at a luminosity around, at most, 1029/cm2s.
This is significant because this basically means that in about a day we can collect the same amount of data that we have collected over the past few months. That’s why it’s so useful to do studies on increasing the luminosity rather than continuing to run at lower luminosities.
There’s a short term downside though: doing studies to increase luminosity makes it hard to get clean, stable beams for data taking. It’s kind of like deciding whether you should buy a computer now, or wait a few months until prices come down and hardware is better.
The LHC has a balanced program of stable running and also doing studies to increase luminosity. From the looks of it, it’s going well.
