Large Hadron Collider Achieves Data Milestone

The Large Hadron Collider hit a data milestone...one inverse femtobarn. We're not really sure how much that is but it sounds like a whole crapload of inverted barns.

The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million (70 x 1012) collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run. That it has been achieved just three months after the first beams of 2011 is testimony to how well the LHC is running.

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