LHC proton run for 2011 reaches successful conclusion

[hue]

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR22.11E.html

Geneva, 31 October 2011. After some 180 days of running and four hundred trillion (4x1014) proton proton collisions, the LHC’s 2011 proton run came to an end at 5.15pm yesterday evening. For the second year running, the LHC team has largely surpassed its operational objectives, steadily increasing the rate at which the LHC has delivered data to the experiments.

At the beginning of the year’s run, the objective for the LHC was to deliver a quantity of data known to physicists as one inverse femtobarn during the course of 2011. The first inverse femtobarn came on 17 June, setting the experiments up well for the major physics conferences of the summer and requiring the 2011 data objective to be revised upwards to five inverse femtobarns. That milestone was passed by 18 October, with the grand total for the year being almost six inverse femtobarns delivered to each of the two general-purpose experiments ATLAS and CMS.