I need to break through bloggers block….and in the interest of having someone other than my relatives read this, I’ll be brief.
The most exciting news from CMS is that lowering has recommenced! This is the part where we take the big chunks of our experiment and lower them 90 m down to the cavern floor. To see how this goes, time lapse videos are available for Endcap 2 (alternative view ) Endcap 1 with the funny looking nose, Barrel 2, and the piece de resistance, the central barrel, aka YB0, which holds the most powerful magnet ever built, and only had a few tens of centimeters of clearance over a 13 meter length. YB0 weighs about 1200 tons, and its touchdown on Feb 28 released a flood of media attention as well as a flood of work. When YB0 was placed, work could begin installing all the cables and pipes needed to drive all the detectors inside the magnet bore, namely the Tracker, Electromagnetic Calorimeter, and Hadronic Calorimeter Barrel. For the last 7 months that has been going on at a furious pace, and has only now abated enough that the lowering of the other side (the “minus” side) can commence. This starts with the first barrel piece “YB-1”, which touched down yesterday! Here it is on the cavern floor:
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Fortunately the rest of the pieces still to be lowered are mostly precabled, so the duration between subsequent lowerings should be considerably less than 7 months from here on out (indeed, the 5 “plus” side pieces went down all in about 3 months).
By the way, my Dad is visiting, but he doesn’t get the wrench until he hands over the Boson.
