Sleepless Nights Lead to First Results of 2010...

6 June 2010 | By

Do you hear that? The incessant typing? The coffee machines vending cup after cup? If you go to Building 40, or Building 32, Building 188, or to any one of the many graduate student offices around the world, you will hear the tap of key boards, the whir of disk drives, and even the occasional heated civil discussions with "elevated" voices.

What is all of the work for? Well, in High Energy Physics (HEP) there are "seasons" of conferences, and this year the first conferences to see the first LHC physics results of 2010 will be the summer conferences. The first big one being a conference called Physics at LHC (PLHC). The conference is being held at Hamburg Germany and physicists from all of the LHC experiments are working around the clock (and around the world) to look at the latest data and understand it before it gets presented at the conference.

Everyone is working to check, double check and even quadruple check their results. It will be the first time that results from the data taken this year will be shown to the public, and there are bunches of them! The results are based upon the modest data sample that we have collected so far since March (modest compared to what we will have in the next few months), however they will demonstrate that we are well on our way to understanding our detectors and understanding Standard Model physics at the new energy frontier of the LHC. Basically, it will be another set of exciting Firsts for ATLAS and the LHC and a demonstration that the LHC is progressing towards an understanding of the unknown.