Bij CMS zit de stemming er in. Na allerlei tegenslagen hebben wij ons eerste resultaat gepubliceerd. De analyse van de botsingen die de Large Hadron Collider eind 2009 heeft geproduceerd heeft enkele maanden geduurd, maar nu is iedereen binnen de collaboratie (dus meer dan 2500 natuurkundigen) ervan overtuigd dat de resultaten solide genoeg zijn om met de rest van de Deeltjesfysica-gemeenschap te delen. Maar wat hebben we nou precies gemeten?
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After having been off-line for a while due to a summer-school and other activities, it almost seems impossible to summarize what has happened the last four weeks. We went from being euphoric on September 10th to a state of just-keep-going after the 19th . From “first beam in LHC” to “an incident in sector 34”. From writing a thesis with first data to basing my work on simulation? We obviously hope for a quick recovery and trust in the skills of the people working to fix this, but you never know.
I think that the incident (see Freya’s blog for more information) came as a shock to everyone working on the LHC, (more…)
The CERN directorate has come out with a statement.
Press-release
LHC re-start scheduled for 2009
Geneva, 23 September 2008. Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel have indicated that the most likely cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets. Before a full understanding of the incident can be established, however, the sector has to be brought to room temperature and the magnets involved opened up for inspection. This will take three to four weeks. Full details of this investigation will be made available once it is complete. (more…)
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…)
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…)
I think that by far the most to the point statement anybody made during the FDR II operations meeting was: “We should keep on going. In real life we also cannot shut down the detector.” Let me explain the above and tell you why I thought it was hilarious.The Full Dress Rehearsal number two started on Tuesday 4th of June and was, like its predecessor the FDR I, mainly a computing exercise (see Final Dress Rehearsal). Again the goal was to pump mock-data through all the computer systems that we will also use for first “real” data. Like it will probably also happen when the detector is running, there (more…)
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