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
