LHC portal

Hey, its still a very useful resource that I check out most days - so don't knock yourself out if you are busy with other stuff (I know how that goes).

Thank you for the information, Tau. Can you explain something? If 25 ns bunch separation does not allow you to have more bunches, then what does it achieve? From where I'm sitting it seems likely that 25 ns will be harder, so I assume there is an up-side...

Hi there, very pleased to see the beam setup appear! Looking forwards to watching the progress at 13 TeV.

But I wanted to say - the 'Statistics' link on the left doesn't work any more - page only accessible from within CERN....

the only beams that were kept much longer than this were kept for the reason that there was no setup beam available from the SPS at that time so dumping would have left them with nothing, not even the chance to refill.

Ah - I hadn't spotted that - thanks

I've been looking at the integrated luminosity in the statistics page & there's something I don't understand. On each run the luminosity starts off pretty high and decays down so that after say 10 hours of stable beams it's about 1/3 of the initial value. I haven't tried to work out the optimal valu...

Thank you everyone for coming up with answers to my question. Much appreciated.

Can anybody explain to me what causes the short downward blips every 100 mins or so in the luminosity trace during stable beams? At first I thought they were glitches but they seem too regular to be unintentional.

Fingers crossed but things seem to be running smoothly again. Impressive work.

Everything seems to be going very smoothly ... too smoothly ...

Seriously though, is it my imagination or is it taking much less time between the end of one period of stable beams and the start of the next? The turnround only seems to take about two hours - I'm sure it used to take longer.

Has the schedule (as available from the portal) been revised? Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, we should be in the middle of a technical stop right now...

Not sure if any of these suggestions are reasonable or if I would be able to attend but: I would like to: 1. See the accelerator and detector hardware 2. Meet with the engineers who designed & operate the LHC & detectors to try to get a better idea of the issues involved in making it operate and wha...

Anybody know what the schedule is for restarting operations in 2011? Will it be more ions work or will proton experiments be back?

Hi Amiso, It doesn't look like anybody else is going to have a go at explaining this so I shall have a try, but my understanding is very limited - if I get something hopelessly wrong can someone correct me. I think that, if you go to the main portal area, there is a link on the left called "Accelera...

56 bunches in, ramp done and squeeze underway. Here we go...

> And they're planning to test bunch trains too

So I see. I haven't managed to find out exactly what a bunch train is - though I can make a good guess - can anybody give me a shortish description?

And 48 bunch operations too ... very impressive steady progress.

Does anybody know if ALICE is having difficulties? Recently while stable high intensity beams are circulating and all the other detectors are doing PHYSICS, ALICE always seems to be NOT READY.