LHC completes first year of Run3

©CERN

At 6 AM in the morning of November 28th the first year of LHC Run3 concluded 21 weeks after the first collisions at 13.6 TeV centre-of-mass energy.

2022 was a year of commissioning the whole complex after the three year long shutdown no. 2 where both the LHC accelerator and the ATLAS detector had experienced major upgrades and modifications. Nevertheless the LHC accelerator and the ATLAS detector exceeded the initial expectations for 2022 by far. The integrated luminosity of 40 fb^-1 delivered to the ATLAS detector significantly surpasses the prediction of just 25 fb^-1 for this year. This success was achieved despite a two weeks ealier stop in 2022 due to the worldwide energy crisis. During the coming months, the whole complex steps into a technical stop to service the LHC accelerator and the ATLAS detector before the Run3 will continue in spring next year.

The excellent performance in 2022 gives the confidence to reach the ultimate goal of Run3 to accumulate 300 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity. This provides a huge number of proton-proton collision events which will be investigated for detailed scrutinies of the Standard Model of elementary particles. Moreover, every additional collision event might contain yet unobserved elementary particles. Thus the growth of integrated luminosity pushes the reach of the many searches for such new physics phenomena needed to solve the open questions of the Standard Model. 

Event displays from the recent Run3 and from previous measurement runs can be found from this webpage of the ATLAS collaboration.