The inverse picobarn threshold has been crossed in ATLAS!

Another milestone has been passed in the long run of ATLAS toward new physics.
On Monday August 9, 2010 ATLAS has recorded the first inverse picobarn (pb^-1) of 7 TeV collisions. The trend is good and we recently reached the 0.1 pb^-1 per day of integrated luminosity (meaning that we can now collect in ~10 days the amount of data we have collected over the last 4 months).

The integrated luminosity delivered by LHC (green) and recorded by ATLAS (yellow)

This pb^-1 threshold has a psychological impact, as we now change units to evaluate our physics reach, and we’ll stay with these units for many months (the 1 fb^-1 (or 1000 pb^-1) threshold is for end-2011 in the current plans).
What is the meaning of “1 inverse picobarn” of data? It means that we have in our data 1 event if the cross-section of the process that gives birth to this event is of 1 picobarn (pb) and we are fully efficient to select it. As the ordinary collisions at 7 TeV have a cross-section of ~10¹¹ pb, it means that we start to “see” events as rare as 1 in 100 billions.
So, just to make one example, we have order of 10⁴ W–>lepton+neutrino and 10³ Z0–>lepton+lepton in the data and few tens of top decays should also show-up (some candidates already exist, see previous post).
The old particles “zoo” (including the heavier partners) all show-up in this first pb^-1 and will be studied in detail also using the other pb^-1‘s soon to come.
More we go into the many-pb^-1 domain, more details of the known physics we can study and more windows to the new physics will open-up.
A challenging and exciting time in front of us!ç

Fuente: pdg2.lbl.gov