Milestones

In case you haven't heard, early on Friday morning the LHC reached an energy of 3.5 TeV per beam,   its target energy for 2010-2011.  They did not collide the beams, in fact they lost them five minutes after reaching the historic energy, however they achieved a big milestone in reaching that energy.  The first official collisions at 7 TeV are due March 30th, when CERN hosts another "media day" where they invite the press to witness the event.  I'm sure the beam operators agree with us experimentalists that its pretty ridiculous to specify a day for first collisions.  It's like prescheduling a press conference for the birth of a child.  Sure there is a due date, but when the big event will actually occur is hard to predict.  Unlike labor, however, the first collisions can be held up by the "powers that be" if they look like they are going to be ready ahead of time.

LHC operators on Friday morning.

 I got this from a cool CERN page of pictures about the 7 TeV beams.

  While I was not in the control room for the 7 TeV beams, I was around for a crucial precursor test on Thursday night.  The LHC installed a new quench protection system (QPS) in the wake of the 2008 accident, to prevent the disaster that gave us this year long delay from happening again.  A quench, as I've mentioned before, is when a superconducting magnet, which has no resistance in its superconducting state, develops a resistance and suddenly losses its superconductivity.  I'm not sure if it's the new part of the system, or the existing part, but the QPS is now too sensitive.  When the LHC is turning up the currents in the magnets to bring them to the needed strength for a 7 TeV beam, the little fluctuations in the current values are enough to set the QPS system off.  This is problematic because what the QPS actually does is induce a controlled quench, distributing the energy more evenly along the magnet system.  In the tests performed early this week many magnets were quenching due to the QPS which is dangerous for the machine because the released energy heats up the superfluid helium and the LHC cooling system can't handle many magnets quenching at once.  As a temporary solution the beam operators decided to ramp up the current 5x more slowly than they normally do.  They were testing this fix by ramping the current in the magnets without beams durning my Thursday shift.  If it worked then we could ignore the QPS problems and procede with the 7 TeV beams, if it didn't the LHC would have to order new hardware to fix the problem which would've meant another 1-2 month delay.  We all held our breath and watched the LHC current inch upward on the monitoring plots during the 75 min ramp.  It was quite exciting when they reached the necessary current, even though there were not any beams!

The other milestone which makes this post title plural, is that I am now a fully qualified pixel shifter.  This isn't a big deal, all it means is that I get to sit at the Pixel desk all by myself and do what the experts tell me to do.  But still, it is kinda neat because I've had very little contact with the actual detector since I joined the Berkeley ATLAS group.  When I was at Orsay I worked on pieces of the Liquid Argon calorimeter, but since then I have been exclusively working on software.  It is fun to sit in front of four monitors and run calibration scans or monitor the detector status.  I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon, most likely next week during one of my four morning shifts, but for now it is amusing.   

Party in the PHYSICS LAB

Now for a bit of levity: LA = CERN, Nashville = LBL, Party = Meeting


Miley Cyrus - Party In The USA - (Official Music Video) [HD]
envoyé par VeronicaMars157. - Clip, interview et concert.

Inspired by this amusing post in ThinkProgress.

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.... 

Wrong Decision?

I may have made a bad decision today.  A furnished studio apartment sublet was posted on the CERN market place and I was lucky enough to be the first to contact the person who posted the ad, a friendly Italian transplant named Donatino who specializes in the construction of tunnels for CERN*.  He was particularly proud of having worked on the section of the LHC tunnel, originally created for the LEP collider in the 1980s, which lies under the Jura mountains.  They blasted out a 3km section of the tunnel under 170m of Mesozoic rock!  I was particularly amused by this because one of my favorite memories of the SSC, the doomed super collider in Texas which my dad worked on in the late 80s/early 90s, were the pictures of the massive tunnel boring machines, used to create the deep underground tunnels.

A picture of an SSC boring machine, or Robbins.  

The 2nd guy on the left even looks like my dad!...well, the mustache looks like his.

Those machines captured my imagination, perhaps due to their resemblance to robotic worm monsters.

Donatino met me at CERN and took me to the studio of his lady friend, a nice woman named Fatima who was a teacher in her home country but had recently lost her job as a cleaner, the only job she could get in Switzerland.  She was moving in with Donatino to save money and they were renting out her studio.  Explaining the situation to me prompted Donatino to launch into a diatribe about the Swiss autonomons, whose rigidity and rules and unwillingness to give a hardworking woman like Fatima a job infuriated him.    He claimed that out of a population of seven million, one million Swiss inhabitants are unemployed.  I didn't check his numbers, but I would not be surprised if that was true and, having had my own experiences with Swiss bureaucracy, I could sympathize a bit with his frustration.    

Walking into the building I knew that it was going to be a very nice place.  It was on the bottom floor of an apartment building in a cluster of high rises situated in a quiet residential neighborhood.  The floor of the entry was granite and the walls were covered in nice wood paneling.  The studio itself had an enormous bathroom and a decently sized and nicely decorated main room.  The kitchen, however, was essentially a closet with two ceramic hotplates for cooking.  There was no oven and the refrigerator was actually in a closet.  Tragically, this setup is standard for studios around here.  

I was torn.  I knew the apartment was very nice, especially for the price, and I was sure that I probably wouldn't see anything like it in my future searches.  However, aside from the kitchen, two other aspects gave me pause.  The bed, which was twin sized, looked like a cot, and it would take 3 bus rides to get to CERN everyday.  I left, telling them I would mull it over and give them an answer in a few hours.  

As I went back to my office conflicted, weighing the pros of having a nice place to myself against the cons of the distance and the lack of an oven, two priorities crystalized in my mind.  I realized that I would be happy either with a nice kitchen or with easy access to public transportation.  I'd be willing to sacrifice one or the other, but that I'm not desperate enough to give up both yet.  I reasoned that I've only been here for five days and I have 25 more left to look, so I could probably find something suitable with a little more effort.  All the warnings I've gotten about how hard it is to find a place tell me that there is a good probability that I will not, in fact, find as nice a place, and I will probably get desperate and take something much worse than what I saw today.  But at this point I didn't want to settle.  When the panic sets in I'm sure I'll be kicking myself, but right now I'm willing to take the chance.  Fingers crossed!

*I have to mention that Donatino was wearing a winter coat made of puffy down encased in black plastic vinyl.  It was amazing.

The Blog is Back!

The Jura mountains from my CERN hostel room window.  Don't they make you want to go skiing?

Hello from Switzerland, my home for the next seven months.  I arrived on Friday, March 5th, and along with the move came a renewed commitment to blogging.  My first, and only other, foray into blogging occurred while I was living in France and I found that it was a good way to keep my family and friends informed about my life abroad.  Consequently, this blog will take on a slightly more personal bent while I'm here, although I intend to continue to focus on physics and food (and feminism--another theme that didn't make it into the title).   Posts about food will have to wait until I find an apartment; I'm currently living at CERN in the hostel and eating all my meals in the lab cafeteria.  It is much better than eating in any cafeteria I've been to in the US, but it's not the same as cooking for yourself.  I've started the search for an apartment which I expect, based on stories from fellow students, to be an arduous task.  Geneva is one of the most expensive places to live and the housing market is severely impacted so I expect to expend a significant amount of energy looking for a place in the next few weeks.
Today was International Women's Day.  CERN celebrated it in a big way, with media events and stunts such as filling all the control rooms of the detectors and the LHC with women.  They have a website dedicated to it where you could see the women in action via webcams.  The page also hosts videos of women physicists talking about why the day is important to them and links to other material about the events.  International women's day seems to be a bigger event outside of the US.  I've never heard much about it back home but I think its a good idea, generally.  Side note: did you know that Swiss women didn't get the right to vote until 1971?!  Crazy!

It must've been pretty cool to be in a women-only control room.  I am not yet qualified to take any detector shifts, but this week I am getting my certification through a week long training.  I will soon be qualified to operate the Pixel Detector!  Expect some posts on the joys of night shifts in a couple of weeks.

Also expect some posts about the return of collisions to the LHC.  The machine is preparing to collide protons at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, which is half of the design energy but more than 3 times greater than the TeVatron, the previous highest energy accelerator.  If you can't wait for me to post about it, or read about it a major newspaper, CERN has a twitter feed which you can follow.  As my Dad would say, 'Oh Boy'.  I hope the collisions come while I'm on shift next week.  It would be absolutely amazing if the first 7 TeV collisions happened while I was in the control room.  Fingers Crossed!

And lastly, there were some successful statewide protests in California about the education budget on March 4th.  I couldn't attend because I was flying here, but the SF Chronicle and the LA Times had articles on it.  Students in Texas, Illinois and elsewhere also protested.  I'm sad to have missed it.

PS: You should check out the new Atlas public website, its pretty nice and has links to what's going on in the control room.

A Stand In

CMS, our competitor (from the article)

Someday soon I'll find the inspiration to write a real post, perhaps about the UC budget situation, my impending move to CERN and what that entails, the trip I'm going to take to DC at the end of February or maybe even a recipe.  But right now I've been doing a lot of work and a lot of writing for work, rendering me incapable of writing complete sentences about anything other than tracking efficiencies.  In the meantime I invite you to read this article in Vanity Fair about the LHC.  I think its pretty good.  It captures the excitement and gives you a little bit of a feel of what its like to be at CERN. 

Our Voices Have Been Heard!

I've been meaning to write a welcome back/what's been up post, but this couldn't wait.  Check-out this article in the NY Times. 

Choice quotes:

Under the governor’s proposal, no less than 10 percent of the state’s general fund would be allotted for higher education and no more than 7 percent would go to the state prison system. If the administration fails to win passage in the Legislature, it will probably seek to put the issue before voters in a ballot initiative.

 “The priorities have become out of whack over the years,” the governor told lawmakers. “I mean, think about it, 30 years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education, and 3 percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons, and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education.”

“Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point,” the governor’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, said in an interview after the speech. “Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.”

 I'm not holding my breath for big changes because the prison lobby is so strong, and well, its probably a large part politics and posturing, but I can't help but get excited and find it to be encouraging.  There are a lot of flaws with the governors other proposals (not addressing why the prisons are so over crowded, privatization of the prisons, etc) but I'm heartened by the fact that at some level the actions we took in the fall have had an effect.