Half life sems to have increased from 10 to 12.5 hours

[jmc2000]

It could be my imagination, but the beam half life seems to have increased from 10 to 12.5 hours. I didn't think there was much they could do about it since it was tied up in the physics of the collisions, but perhaps it's down to reducing the losses.

[adam_jeff]

For the last week or so they were experimenting with main-satellite collisions in the two 'low-luminosity' experiments. In other words, instead of colliding two main bunches, they collide a main bunch with one of the very small 'satellite' bunches, that is, a bunch of particles in a supposedly unoccupied bucket.
I think this is what leads to the increase in lifetime, since effectively each bunch is only used for half the collisions in LHCb and ALICE (the other half being the satellites). The normal main-main collisions continue in CMS and ATLAS.