WooHoo!
The CMS Tracker, the worlds largest Silicon strip detector by about a factor of 10 or more, is on the move. Elvis has left the building!
This is the detector my group works on, and it is huge – enough Silicon modules to cover a backyard swimming pool, 10 million channels, and quite a feat to put together and run. Last year it was put together on the Meyrin site in the Tracker Integration Facility, and this evening it took the journey to CMS. I blogged about it before, so at least that’s a documented prediction about the LHC that came true! Another very big milestone on the road to startup for CMS.
Now the real fun starts – well, most likely after the holidays, but then we have to cable up and check out this behemoth – our fantastic postdoc just gave a plenary talk at the CMS week about our avante garde (literally) project which was to install a small spare piece of tracker early, to get all the bugs with the power supply system and DAQ worked out before the real deal arrived. As an added bonus, this device was the first piece of the Tracker to be used in the CMS Global Runs, and not only was the first subdetector integrated into the Global DAQ, but also was able to be powered overnight without attendance, which means we ran more than one billion triggers through it overnight, with no trouble from our side or the Central DAQ side. This bodes well for the future, but lets hope the real deal doesn’t give us too many nasty surprises.
It’s CMS week, which means a whole lot of meetings…I attended a fair amount by videoconference, which in some respects is better than being there, when all the technology works. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work so well, but it is getting better with demand. I guess the big news this CMS week is the election of Dan Green, a Fermilab physicist, as Chair of the Collaboration Board. If the Spokesperson is “the president”, the Collaboration Board would be “the Senate”, although maybe the British version with “Prime Minister” and “House of Lords” would for be more apt, seeing as it is a European based experiment. Anyway, since our collaboration is 30% US based, more than any other country, it is good to see US representation at the highest levels of CMS. Besides that, Dan has been involved for quite a long time and is well respected by the entire collaboration, so his appointment as Chair is welcomed by all collaborators independent of nationality.
Now all we have to do is get another Fermilab physicist elected to Congress!
