I’m on pixel shift in the ATLAS control room at the moment. We’ve had a very successful run, with stable LHC beams for about the past 12 hours. The luminosity of the detector is another step forward, because the past two nights have seen more bunches per beam than ever before. The lifetime of the beam is also excellent. You can see below that the luminosity of the beam has only been decaying very slowly for the past 9 or 10 hours.
The LHC reports that, after the dump, they will fill the LHC for another physics run. I’m actually not sure why they’re dumping so soon, given that it will likely take a few hours to dump and refill, and the beam still has a lot of oomph in it. Some ideas off the top of my head: maybe the LHC experts think it’s best to do the dump and refill during the day shift; maybe they think that the luminosity in the next run can be made even better; or maybe they want to get more practice and collect more data about the start of physics fills in this configuration. But the bottom line, for me and for ATLAS, is that when they dump the beam, we reset our detector and get ready for the next physics run.
Ok, gotta go, it’s time for the beam dump!
LHC Status from July 31, 2010 at 11:49 AM
