Wednesday 7 April 2010

W bosons back at CERN



No words needed, the pictures say it all. Welcome back, after 10 almost years! Apparently, the LHC has already acquired nearly 1 inverse nanobarn of luminosity, one milionth of what is planned for the 2010-2011 run. By now there must be several hadronically decaying W bosons on tape (W decays to an electron or muon only 10 percent of the times each). Now we're dying to see first LHC Z bosons, and soon enough first European top quarks :-)

More ATLAS events here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Waiting for the Z to show up, beautifully clean...

Michael said...

It is exciting to see some W candidates, and these event displays are certainly pretty!

A couple of corrections, though: no one has an nb-1 yet, or even a quarter of that. By the end the week, sure.

And as for W bosons, the Tevatron has been producing and analyzing them for more then 10 years.

Anonymous said...

It was W's back at CERN. And it's nice to see them just after a few days of starting the run.

Jester said...

The cross section for W going to electrons or muons at 7 TeV is some 10 nb each. So Michael is right: 0.1 inverse nanobarn per experiment is a better estimate of the current luminosity status.