Last week I attended the annual LHC performance workshop in Chamonix. This meeting is an essential part of the CERN calendar, allowing colleagues from the accelerator community, along with representatives of the experiments and of other sectors and departments, to take stock of the accelerators’ performance in the year gone by, and set the direction for the year to come.

This year’s discussions were as lively, constructive and stimulating as I remember them to have been from the period of Run 1, when I attended several Chamonix workshops as ATLAS Spokesperson. Sessions covered everything from lessons learned in 2015, to operational improvements and plans for 2016, along with the status of the LHC injectors upgrade (LIU) and High Luminosity LHC projects. The broad conclusions are that in 2015 a large number of complex problems and subtle issues were successfully addressed, and 2016 will be a year of luminosity production: delivering large quantities of data to the experiments. The instantaneous luminosity in ATLAS and CMS should reach the design value of 10³⁴ cm^-2 s^-1 this year, thanks mainly to more squeezed colliding beams and a larger number of circulating bunches, and the integrated luminosity delivered to each should approach 30 fb^-1.

For me personally, Chamonix workshops are always a very stimulating experience, a source of learning, the occasion of fruitful discussions with many colleagues, and an injection of energy and enthusiasm for the months to come.

A full report can be found here.

To learn more about the Chamonix workshop, read the Bulletin article "Chamonix 2016: setting the future course for the LHC and the accelerator complex"