My First Night Shift

Last night was my first night shift and...wow... was it boring.  The LHC was doing injection tests as part of its effort to eventually produce collisions at 7 TeV.  As you might imagine, it is not easy to get packets of protons traveling in a 17 mile long tunnel at nearly the speed of light to collide in a spot the size of a human hair.  Weeks of preliminary tests, such as the ones performed last night, are needed, which is pretty boring for the experiments, but I'm sure its fascinating for the accelerator people.

The LHC accelerator chain

The injection tests performed last night consisted of taking the protons out of the SPS, an intermediate energy accelerator which bring the protons to 450 GeV, and injecting them into the LHC.  The LHC operators would then vary some parameters, only taking the beam partway around the ring until they dumped it into some protective equipment called collimators.  This is a dangerous mode of running for the pixel detector because the spray of particles that the billion or so protons in each bunch create when hitting the collimators has a total energy which is much greater than what we see in the single proton-proton collisions.  If the pixel detector were to be on and make a measurement of all of that energy it would short circuit the detector and we would be, as they say, screwed.  So we keep the detector in standby mode so that it does not record the energy deposited and remains a functioning detector.  But that means that as a shifter I have nothing to do.  It wasn't too bad because I got a lot of work done and the other people on shift were nice, but I'm really glad I only have one night shift.  

One of the perks of the night shift was that I had several shots of espresso from our nespresso venting machine. Cool

Absolutely vital to make it through a night shift (via CERN Love)

The photo above is from a blog that my training shifter showed me called CERN Love, written by some anonymous physicists at CERN.  It's pretty funny, you should check it out!

In other news, the apartment search continues.  I'm currently trying to find a place in Meyrin, the town in between Geneva and CERN.  What it lacks in charm it makes up for by the fact that it is the last stop on a direct tram connection to Geneva while at the same time being close to CERN, the countryside and the beautiful Jura mountains.  My fingers are again crossed.... 

LHC in the News

Denis Overbye, a NYTimes science writer who I'm not particularly fond of because of his bent towards the sensationalistic and grandiose, had a front page story today on the problems that are plaguing the LHC. None of the information is new, but it gives an accurate, if somewhat unflattering, update on the problems and repairs. The article is relatively good, i.e factual, except for a number of irritating quotes by hotshot theorists such as this gem from Nima Arkani Hamed:

“I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

Well Professor Arkani-Hamed, would you like to take up a welding torch or get your hands messy with some magnet calculations? And why were you talking to him in the first place, Mr. Overbye?


Later this week CERN management will make a decision as to how much energy we will run at and for how long (something I will explain in a later post) so that will be some real news.