Last weekend, on Saturday March 7th, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time in 2026 reached the Stable Beams conditions during proton-proton collisions at 13.6 TeV energy. The beams are declared “stable” when all parts of the LHC and its detectors are on and we start registering the data which we use for the physics papers. This milestone is preceded by a period of beam commissioning, which was unusually short this year and lasted less than a month, starting in mid February.
The whole 2026 Run (data-taking period) is expected to be short as well, scheduled to end already in June rather than towards the end of the year. Nevertheless, we anticipate a lot of interesting activities, most notably three weeks of the special low-pileup runs–the regime in which far fewer proton-proton collisions occur at the same time than during standard running. PPC has been one of the key drivers in establishing CMS physics program and trigger menu for the low-pileup regime–the lower level of background in such events should allow us to significantly improve precision in W boson mass measurement, heavy flavor studies, and other analyses.
Both our Storage and Transfer and our Tier-0 teams stand ready to ensure robust data-taking operations for CMS during this final year of Run 3. In July, the Long Shutdown is expected to begin, during which we will perform Phase-2 upgrades of the CMS detector and prepare for Run 4 of the High-Luminosity LHC.
