Shift Summary and Outlook on the Upcoming Collisions

On Thursday I took my final shift for this block and, after three weeks of training and shifting, I was quite happy to not see the control room at 6:45am Friday morning.  Appropriately, the last hour of my last shift was the most exciting, complete with a bevy of experts swearing at the detector.  We lost control of two of the read out elements of the pixel detector and wresting them back into a state where we could communicate with them was a challenge.  I, having no idea what was going on, took orders and clicked where I was told to click and typed what I was told to type.  In the end all was fine (there was never any danger to the pixels or to ATLAS) and everyone, the experts included, learned something.

As I mentioned before, Tuesday is the big day when the LHC is going to produce, with the media to bear witness, its first 7 TeV collisions.  The preparations and build up to Media Day were already underway last week.  Twice we had video crews in the control room interviewing us at our stations.  I had the opportunity to speak with some filmmakers producing a documentary for a british funding agency and was requested to say an enthusiastic "ready!" to another team.  Besides the cameras in the control room there were many cameras in the Atlas Visitor's Center, which shares a smoked glass wall with the control room so that the visitors can see us scientists in our natural state.  When I first started taking shifts someone had taped a "don't feed the physicists" sign to the wall.  I now have great sympathy for zoo animals.  The visitors like to take pictures so you quickly learn to ignore their flashes and peering faces.

The view of the control room from the Visitor's center (via CERN)

As for as my part in the Media Day preparation, I am working on setting up a system so that members of the collaboration can quickly see plots as soon as the collisions happen.  Unfortunately I cannot share them here because we have rules about what we can show the public (almost nothing) but as soon as some pictures get made public I'll post them here!  

You can follow Tuesday's events from the CERN website, or even see a webcam of the Atlas Control Room if you register your ip address in advance.