Today, November 23, 2024, the LHC crew at CERN completed the running of the Large Hadron Collider for 2024, which was the tenth year and resulted in a record data accumulation. The beginning of 2024 went picture book perfect: when looking at the delivered luminosity it followed the expected luminosity prediction like pearls on a string. By mid year several issues disturbed the flow of data and the luminosity fell behind. Adjustments were obviously made to catch up and reach the target. The LHC crew was able to stabilize the running and a furious catch up ensued during late July and August, which among other was based on much more efficient turnaround on the filling of the machine. The machine delivered 124/fb at 13/6 TeV to the big ATLAS and CMS experiments. This is 11% more than what had been promised and close to two times as much as the any run before, thus a new record.
The last physics run was a short but successful and much anticipated run of Heavy Ion Collisions. Lead ions were brought to collision at a center-of-mass energy of 5.36 TeV to accumulate an integrated luminosity of 1.98/nb.
The PPC has been keeping up with the data delivery and is working on the analysis of this wealth of data.