CERN Council looking forward to promising future
The excellent performance of the LHC – and the promise of five new Member States in the near future – were celebrated during the 159th meeting of the CERN Council at the end of last month.
On the 17 June this year the LHC reported a total delivery of one inverse femtobarn of data to the experiments – already meeting the target for the entirety of the 2011 run.
“A year ago, I thought the delivery of an inverse femtobarn in 2011 was an ambitious target,” said CERN Council president Michel Spiro. “Now the machine is delivering in a single 12 hour fill the same amount of data that was delivered in the whole 2010 run. It’s a great achievement to get this complex machine up to speed so quickly.”
The LHC is expected to reach a total of five-ten inverse femtobarns of data by the end of 2012 – with ten inverse femtobarns sufficient to explore the potential for new physics that emerges with the LHC running at 3.5 TeV per beam, and also to definitively confirm or refute the existence of the Higgs particle.
While the data recorded so far is unlikely to reveal new physics in time for the summer conferences this year, they will be enough to home in significantly on such phenomena as supersymmetry and the Higgs mechanism.
“We’re definitely getting close to new physics at the LHC,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, “…and whether it’s supersymmetry, Higgs or none of the above, our understanding of the universe is about to change.”
In addition, the council was informed at the meeting that five additional countries – Cyprus, Israel, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey – have formalised their desire to become CERN Member States in the future.
