First LHC Data!
Noted with great pleasure- the first preprint on LHC data has been posted by the ALICE Collaboration.
!!! CONGRATULATIONS !!!
This is a marvelous tribute to the hundreds of physicists, students, engineers and technicians, many of whom have invested nearly two decades towards this achievement.
The paper presents ALICE’s measurement of the charged particle pseudo-rapidity density and its distribution for |η|<1 in √s=900 GeV p+p collisions. The results, obtained from only 284 events, are in good agreement with UA5 data for proton-antiproton collisions at this energy. But what’s important is this demonstration that ALICE can (very!) quickly extract physics data from a few collisions, suggesting that new results from new energy regimes will appear very quickly as the LHC increases the collision energy.