## Monday, May 23, 2011 ... /////

### LHC surpasses an inverse nanobarn per second

As you can see in the right sidebar of this blog, the maximum instantaneous luminosity that the ATLAS detector has experienced so is

1100/μb/s = 34.7/fb/year.
So each major detector has surpassed 1/nb during the night. Congratulations! Note that because the nanobarns are inverse, the usual prefixes "micro, nano, pico, femto" are separated by factors of one thousand but in the opposite ordering.

Also, the integrated luminosity recorded by either detector has surpassed 400/pb (400 inverse picobarns) i.e. 0.4/fb (almost one half of the inverse femtobarn); each detector has experienced about 30 trillion collisions, most of them in 2011, of course. It seems extremely likely that an inverse femtobarn will be achieved in 2011 - and it's very plausible that many of them.

The luminosity (number of collisions per second, rescaled to other units) keeps on increasing by raising various quantities. See Phil Gibbs' blog for some details.

The LHC will continue through the end of 2012. I believe that because of further looming improvements, it will have collected 17/fb by that time - which is the approximate expected luminosity needed for a 5-sigma discovery of a 115 GeV Higgs bosons which is the most difficult mass where it can be hiding.

So by the end of 2012, the LHC should discover the Higgs boson - or find a scary crack in the Standard Model. Of course, it would be more interesting if the LHC found something much more exciting and rich than - and I hope that God will forgive me that I describe His namesake in this prosaic way - a single damn scalar particle! ;-)