OK, the second part of the title isn’t actually true, but more on that in a moment….
The fill that is currently in the LHC started at an instantaneous luminosity over 4E32:
Not only is this the highest collision rate ever achieved at the LHC, it’s also the highest ever at a hadron collider, exceeding the largest instantaneous luminosity ever recorded by Fermilab’s venerable Tevatron collider. As has been discussed by many of the US LHC bloggers, luminosity is key at this point — the larger it is, the more collisions we record, and the greater the chance that we can observe something truly new. In the four hours since the fill started, CMS has already recorded about one sixth of the useful data that was recorded in all of 2010!
As for the Pulitzer, this week Mike Keefe of the Denver Post won the 2011 Pulitzer for editorial cartooning for a portfolio of twenty cartoons that included this one about the LHC. (I’d rather not actually run the cartoon here, as I’m not sure we have the rights to it.) Good to see that we are part of journalism history!
Tags: LHC, luminosity
How much higher can we expect the instant luminosity to get by the end of the year?
Actually, not even the first part is true… let me explain.
This is kind of an unfair comparison. The limiting factor in the Tevatron inst. luminosity are the antiprotons, which are hard to produce, cool down and store (the FNAL complex has 3 other accelerators just for that!)
Otherwise, I would be comparing the LHC with, for instance, the KEKB accelerator, whose instantaneous luminosity reaches something like 2e34 cm-2 s-1, which is indeed the world record for inst. luminosity.
Other than that, the news are exciting
Probably by a factor of about 3. They’ve got 480 proton bunches in the machine now and they’re aiming for over 1000 this year. Allowing for some fine tuning of the collisions that should be comfortably within reach. But even that will only put them at c.15% of the maximum design luminosity so clearly there’s plenty more to come.
Rafael, I’d agree that it’s a fair point — the Tevatron is all about the antiprotons, and the LHC protons are much easier to come by.
I assume records will be broken steadily, but what a week for the LHC so far. The current fill (1732) had > 5E32 instantaneous luminosity. It’s up to 11 hours and the plan apparently is to run it for another 7. It would add > 20 pb-1 to a 15 pb-1 fill just this morning. Great to see things moving along so smoothly now.
Hi Ken,
No problem, I just wanted to make the situation clear. I think that the LHC doesn’t need any type of silly comparison to prove it worthiness.
I have a feeling that if the people in the Tevatron really wanted, they could push higher instantaneous luminosity, but there is no point in it. They are much more interested in recorded integrated luminosity than maximum instantaneous luminosity per fill.
– Rafael
So great article. I enjoyed reading it.