The LHCb collaboration has reached a symbolic milestone this morning, announcing that the experiment has recorded a luminosity of 6 fb-1 integrated over the whole period of data taking 2010-2017. In this way LHCb celebrated ”Jeûne genevois”, a public holiday in the canton of Geneva, where CERN is hosted. The shift crew captured this moment by taking a photo of the live screen in the LHCb Control Centre, see the number 6000 (pb-1) in the lower-left corner of the table in the image. The luminosity delivered by the LHC collider was 6599 pb-1 during this period. LHCb recorded data with an impressive average efficiency of nearly 91%, as it can be seen in the table.
Most of the results highlighted through the years in this page were obtained using the LHC Run 1 data sample, where the full sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb-1 at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV. Today’s announcement means that LHCb has recorded the same luminosity during Run 2 as at the end of Run 1, but now with centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. Since the production cross-section of beauty and charm particles at 13 TeV is about twice as large as that in Run 1, the total sample of beauty particles available for physics analyses is now about three times larger than that recorded during the Run 1 data taking period. The door that will lead to obtain many more interesting results is open wide, as you will be able to see with our future reports in this page.