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CERN LHC Reaches Its Goals For 2010
Anonymous Dupaeur writes "The goals for the first run of the most powerful particle collider (and the most energetic storage ring since ISR) were recently surpassing the 10^32 level of luminosity, with a destructive 15 MJ energy per-beam. This is a significant milestone, opening the way to collect more and more data. The current plan is to stop the proton collisions soon, and provide an ion (Pb) beam and conclude this year with a X-mass break. The next year is expected to bring at least one inverse femtobarn of data, which is achievable with such beam power. After that, the entire accelerator complex will be shut down for a year, due to budget costs for science in Europe."
You take the number of inverse femtobarns ( units of 1/area ) times the cross-section of the interaction/particle/whatever that you're looking for (which varies with energy) to get the total number events that you should see. So, inverse femtobarn is a good unit for amount-of-data-collected.