On the occasion of the LHC having delivered 5 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, I want to put in a plug for my favorite source of interesting LHC facts:
LHC: the guide by the CERN communications group.
Since it’s from 2009, a few things in it are out of date. Most notably, the total beam energy is quoted as 7 TeV per beam, but we’re currently running at 3.5. On the whole, though, it’s a very nice introduction to the technology of the LHC and the questions we hope to address with the LHC experiments. I’ll readily admit that I’ve pulled material from this brochure to use in my talks! I hope they will consider making an updated version soon.
