Today, I am sitting a “shadow shift” at the Online Trigger shifter station. My trainer, the actual shifter, has been outstanding and helped fill in some of the gaps between the online video learning system and the real desk and its duties. There weren’t too many gaps – mostly little things about new tools or the order in which to check things – so it’s been fun. And, we’ve had some great steady data taking all shift. This morning, ATLAS crossed the line and collected over 6 inverse femtobarns of data; that’s 25% more than last year in less than half the time. And there is no end in sight…
Add to that the fact that we are running at 8 TeV, where the production rates for interesting physics processes are all about 20% larger and that means that we actually have in hand the equivalent of 50% more data than in all of 2011 (1.2 x 1.25 x 4.9/fb), thinking in terms of “interesting physics per unit integrated luminosity.”
