Walking into the ATLAS control room (see here for a webcam-picture) to start my very first trainee shift it became clear immediately that I was the only person who did not know what he was doing. The room was full of what we call experts while I was being trained as shifter. There is a big difference between the two: an expert knows what he is doing and a shifter only knows what he is supposed to do (which is to call an expert if in doubt…).
A lot of people worked very hard to get to the point where we are now. In a few weeks and months however we will have to go from a state where only experts know what’s going on to a 24/7 operational schedule which involves non-expert shifters like me. This transition is hard. It is (more…)
Shots taken from the watertower at the Cern (Meyrin) site.
In the red circle: The Globe (Cern’s press centre and exhibition space)
The LHC startup is getting closer and closer. A few previous blog entries already informed you that there was a successful insertion of beam into the LHC. This is of course great news, but means that the testing and final preparations of the detectors has now become serious business. As the CMS pixel detector was planned to be installed as one of the final components before the first beam was delivered, we are very much under pressure to be ready in time.
You can read that as ‘continuously on shift until things are stable enough to be run by non-experts’. This also explains the lack of blog entries by me and some of the other people working closely on the detector, at the moment the pressure is really on and the detector comes first! (more…)
What is true for the Higgs boson itself, also goes for our documentary: sometimes one has to give reality a hand in order to make sure that it looks fine (on film) … ánd that it becomes visible in the first place.
While Sander Snoep (camera) and Frenk van der Sterre (sound) are filming óne of the many computerscreens in LHC’s Central Controlroom (under the ’supervision’ of Cern’s Paul Collier) … >>
… Jan van den Berg (co-direction) is explaining the next scene to prof. dr. Stan Bentvelsen and drs. Alexander Doxiadis (protagonists in our documentary).
In a big experiment like ATLAS you need a system that ensures that everyone contributes to the actual running of the machine instead of just waiting for the perfect data to come out. Everybody who wants to be on the author list of the papers published by the collaboration (and who doesn’t want to be…) needs to spend a certain amount of his or her time on service tasks. These are tasks that help ATLAS function (both the hardware and the software) and operate safely, the latter by doing control room shifts for example.
Together with a colleague we took on a little hardware project where we agreed to make the monitoring of the magnetic field sensors in ATLAS easier. Basically people want to check how the field behaves with different current, over time and if all the sensors are generally (more…)
Posts RSS
Recent Comments