If you were to analyze my daily life based on my posts, you would probably conclude that my average day consists of sitting around in the control room, sitting around in meetings, taking cosmic data, being interrupted by power cuts and cabling things. And today I am certainly 4 for 5 in that list. I spent most of the week in the control room, squeezed in a few meeting, took some cosmic data and was stopped by a full power cut thus ending all attempts at data taking. I have yet to cable anything, but the day is still young.
We are in yet another ‘combined running’ week which is a lot like one of the milestone weeks. But unlike the Milestone weeks which combined all sub-systems in ATLAS, in this week we are only combining the calorimeters: TileCal, Liquid Argon, and the level-one calorimeter trigger. Pretty much from now until beam, we will be having combined running weeks. For example Calo-week this week, or Muon-week, or Inner Detector week or Muon-Calo week, etc.
What we get with the combined running weeks is priceless: the chance to see the sub-systems all running together and to be part of the intensity in the control room as everyone works to get ATLAS ready for beam. But it is not without frustration. When you build any detector, especially something this big, patience is a necessity. Take this week for example, we want to run some tests of our timing but we are delayed several hours because of DAQ problems. Finally we start the tests and the control goes dark due to the power cut. This is life when commissioning a detector. It is a 3-to-1 ratio. What you think will take one hour, always ends up taking three. And it is incredibly frustrating but there is nothing you can do but wait.
That is the control room life. Long periods of nothing, followed by intense periods of frantic activity. Ah! The power is back. The waiting is over, its time to go again!
Tags: commissioning, control room
man..seems like some kind of life.. So what exactly will this 16 billion dollars do?? pay the scientists working on it… and thats it..lol seriously though.. i just herd about this today and it is interesting…
First, let me make an important point: the majority of the scientists on these experiments are funded through academic positions at their home institution. I believe this is true for all of the bloggers here as well. For example, Monica is under the pay-roll of the University of Chicago.
I say this only because I think it’s the reverse situation: CERN is in Europe, and it’s fairly expensive to travel/live there relative to the US!
Anyways, I’m sure somebody else will respond, but here’s a quick link I found which sounds reasonably informative for the public:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/WhyLHC-en.html
I am very excited about the work that you’re doing with Atlas. To infinity and beyond!!!
I can’t wait to see what the pixel detectors come back with
Is finding the Higgs Boson the most important science for the LHC? Will finding the Higgs Boson essentially confirm the validity of the Standard Model? Why do scientist believe that the LHC has sufficient energy to produce the Higgs Boson?
Thanks for your insights – will
Finding the Higgs Boson is key part of LHC’s scientific plan. But it is not the only thing we are searching for. Check out this website for an overview of some of the LHC’s discovery potentials.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Science/Science-en.html
As for the Higgs’ importance to the Standard Model, my fellow blogger, Steve nicely summarizes this here.
http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=105
Thanks, nice blog …
I was watching the local network news and your experiment was the topic. Everybody was quite impressed. As you sit consider the true meaning of Particle Theory.
I am a liquid drop theory scientist. Why?
Because particle theory is the design of nuclear weapons security. We use liquid drop nuclei, you use constituent particle theory, why?
So pass this one around the control room please. NBS-1 the western world’s neutron standard is the cause to binding energy existance and it was created with a discrepancy to make binding itself. NBS-1 is currently at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, with Dr. Gilliam.
Liquid theory is truly possible!
man why you doing this … terminate the program.. do you know what will hapen if something got wrong ????
i hope that all be ok but ….