On Friday, 18 November, a test using collisions of lead ions was carried out in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and provided an opportunity for the experiments to validate the new detectors and new data-processing systems ahead of next year’s lead-lead physics run. In this test run, the center-of-mass energy of the lead-lead collisions delivered by the LHC reached 5.36 TeV for the first time! This also marks the first heavy-ion collision since December 2018 at the end of the LHC Run 2.
MIT Heavy Ion Group members have contributed significantly to the run preparation, led by Dr. Ivan Cali and experts in the CMS collaboration. Postdocs Drs. Yi Chen, Jing Wang, and graduate students Molly Taylor and Pin-Chun Chou have been in the CMS centre monitoring the performance of the CMS detector and making adjustments to trigger menus.
CMS event displays of lead-lead ion collisions in CMS detector during Run 3