CERN Council looks forward to summer conferences and new members

CERN Council looks forward to summer conferences and new members. Geneva, 24 June 2011. At its 159^th session this week, the CERN¹ Council congratulated CERN on the excellent performance of the LHC, and welcomed the news that formal confirmation has been received from the five countries applying for CERN Membership. By 17 June, the LHC had delivered what is known as one inverse femtobarn of data to the experiments. To put that in context, one inverse femtobarn was the target for the whole 2011 run, with five to ten the target for 2011 and 2012 combined. Ten inverse femtobarns is sufficient to explore the potential for new physics emerging with the LHC running at 3.5TeV per beam, and to definitively confirm or refute the existence of the Higgs particle. "A year ago, I thought the delivery of an inverse femtobarn in 2011 was an ambitious target," said Michel Spiro, President of CERN Council.