24 Jun 2011
Geneva, 24 June 2011. At its 159th session this week, the CERN1 Council congratulated CERN on the excellent performance of the LHC, and welcomed the news that formal confirmation has been received from the five countries applying for CERN Membership.
17 Jun 2011
Geneva, 17 June 2011. Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments' quest for new physics. The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million1 collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run.
05 Jun 2011
Geneva, 5 June 2011. In a paper published online by the journal Nature Physics today, the ALPHA experiment at CERN1 reports that it has succeeded in trapping antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes: long enough to begin to study their properties in detail. ALPHA is part of a broad programme at CERN’s antiproton decelerator (AD)2 investigating the mysteries of one of nature’s most elusive substances.
23 May 2011
Geneva, 23 May 2011. The three LHC experiments that study lead ion collisions all presented their latest results today at the annual Quark Matter conference, held this year in Annecy, France. The results are based on analysis of data collected during the last two weeks of the 2010 LHC run, when the LHC switched from protons to lead-ions. All experiments report highly subtle measurements, bringing heavy-ion physics into a new era of high precision studies.
27 Apr 2011
Update 16 May 2011: Shuttle Endeavour launched successfully at 14:56 CEST
Update 10 May 2011: Shuttle launch delayed - launch now planned 16 May 2011. For further updates follow @astroparticle and @ams_02
22 Apr 2011
Geneva, 22 April 2011. Around midnight this night CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 × 1032cm-2s-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 × 1032cm-2s-1, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHC commissioning.
31 Jan 2011
Geneva, 31 January 2011. CERN1 today announced that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012 with a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2011 will be 3.5 TeV. This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory’s machine advisory committee, gives the LHC’s experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years, before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running starting 2014.
