The beam schedule. It is a constant source of anxiety at CERN. If you are interested in the latest-minute fluctuation in the beam schedule, I am not the person to ask. As a principle I refuse to worry about it because there is absolutely nothing that I can do to change it. The beam schedule will be what the beam schedule is regardless of whether I worry or not.
Instead I prefer to lose sleep over preparing ATLAS for beam readiness. Because it would be quite embarrassing with all the hype about the beam schedule to then not have a working detector. And preparing ATLAS for beam is something that at least I can contribute directly to.
The other reason I don’t try to determine the beam schedule on a daily basis is because then I would have to interpret charts like this.
But there are some major announcements worth noting. First the current schedule plans that the machine will be cold (to superconducting temperatures) by mid-June. And that we could expect single beam in July. The first physics run in 2008 will be at an energy of 10TeV. (The machine design is 14TeV and for comparison the Tevatron accelerator in Chicago is 1.96 TeV).
There is disappointment from some that the first run will not be at the full design power. But for me, any beam will do. We have been building and testing this detector for so long. We all want to take it for a test drive. Even a ‘little’ 10 TeV one.
