LHC papers

The Large Hadron Collider, to start up in late 2007, traces its inception back to 1979. There are already more than 4000 papers in the SPIRES database that are about the LHC, either mentioning its name in the title or referring to it in a significant way. More than a third of these papers have been published in journals, with the remainder appearing in conference proceedings, eprints, or reports.

In comparison, the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), which operated from 1988 to 2002, has led to slightly fewer papers, even though many papers exist that report results and analyses related to the four LEP experiments. In contrast, the LHC experiments have not yet started.

The name "LHC" begins to make a significant impact on the literature around 1984, with the appearance of the CERN Report "ECFA-CERN Workshop on Large Hadron Collider in the LEP Tunnel" (CERN-84-10-V-1 and V-2).

According to SPIRES, M. Bassetti and W. Scandale wrote the first article that mentions LHC in the title and was published in a journal. Not surprisingly, the paper was about a fundamental aspect of ring-shaped particle accelerators: magnet technology ("Limiting Effects of Parasitic Sextupoles in the Large Hadron Collider, IEEE Trans.Nucl.Sci. 32, 2228-2230, 1985). Since then, references to the LHC have increased steadily over the years (see chart 1). In 2004 alone, more than 300 published papers referred to the LHC.

Today, more than 100 published LHC-related papers refer to magnets. The most popular topic in the LHC literature, however, is the Higgs boson, a particle proposed by theorist Peter Higgs and others. More than 200 papers about the LHC mention this famous and elusive particle in the title (see chart 2).

The award for the most frequently cited paper with LHC in the title goes to Savas Dimopoulos and Greg Landsberg. In 2001, they published the article "Black holes at the LHC" (Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 161602 (2001), hep-ph/0106295). So far, it has amassed 366 citations in SPIRES.

Travis Brooks, SLAC