Beate Heinemann - Luminosity Measurement at colliders

Abstract:

For particle colliders the two critical quantities that drive the physics potential are the center-of-mass energy and the luminosity. High luminosity is needed for detecting rare processes. A precise understanding of the luminosity is needed for a large part of the physics programme as nearly all cross section measurements of processes are directly proportional to the inverse of the luminosity of the dataset used for the analysis. In this talk I discuss how luminosity can be measured in general, and then discuss specifically the luminosity measurement at the ATLAS experiment and how the uncertainty on these is determined.