This summer, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) embarked on an exciting new chapter—colliding light ions (oxygen and neon) for the very first time, a topic that interestingly enough Heavy Ion physicist are very interested in. From June 29 to July 9, 2025, the LHC didn’t just push hydrogen protons or hulking lead nuclei—it experimented with some of the lighter elements in the periodic table. Some people might call it a small tweak, but for particle physics, it’s exciting. Light Ions are so interesting because they bridge the extremes: They close the large gap between proton–proton and lead–lead collisions in scale. Oxygen (8 protons, 8 neutrons) and neon (10 + 10) create “medium-sized droplets” of quark–gluon plasma (QGP)—the primordial soup formed microseconds after the Big Bang—opening a window into borderline territory where QGP might fade away.
The LHC collaborations have all reacted with news releases that point out the general appreciation of these runs (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS), and it is always refreshing to see that CERN is pushing the envelop with its frontier collider and while it seems all easy there was a complex technological ballet behind the scenes to make this run go smoothly.
From the PPC point of view of course the Storage Manager must efficiently store, index, retrieve, and manage this data across distributed systems, which is a challenge, though with these new type of runs, there was much less data to handle than what the usual Heavy Ion runs require. This raises the question, could these runs have been the best ‘heavy-ion’ experience ever for the Storage Manager team? Guillelmo Gomez-Ceballos, crucial part of the Storage Manager project team says, “During these HI (Op, OO, and NeNe) runs, took data stably at rates of 10-16 GB/s without any noticeable issue. The total integrated luminosity is about 57/nb, a much larger amount than expected.” However he maintains, “In general, I guess the best experience was last year when we managed to take data at more than 30 GB/s, a factor of two higher than the expected goal at the beginning of Run 3. The highest data-taking rate has been about 33 GB/s so far.”
