It may be bedtime back in the United States, but here in Geneva it’s six in the morning, and I’ve just dragged myself out of bed. That’s because I have a “day” shift, which for some bizarre reason begins at 7AM; thus I’ll have to leave my apartment in downtown Geneva in complete darkness. This is actually only a training shift, but I’m still very excited; I’ve spent a long time writing various analysis software, and it will be exciting to really get my hands on the detector!
I was actually in the control room for a few hours yesterday evening, watching one of the first times our pixel detector has been integrated with the whole “combined run,” and hoping to see a track. It was very crowded then; we’ll see how things look at 7 AM.
7:05 I’ve arrived at the ATLAS control room. Some experts are working at our station—were they here all night?—so I and the shifter who’s training me are checking our email and waiting. It’s actually pretty crowded here; I count 17 people in the room at the moment.
8:25 We’ve spent some time looking at all the controls and panels for operating and monitoring the pixel detector. There are a lot of them—we have three computer screens for the purpose, but they don’t even come close to fitting. Our problem right now is that, although we can see hits in the detector on our own monitoring equipment, they aren’t showing up on the main event display. (Hopefully they’ll be there in the recorded offline data that people will look at later!) This was working last night, too.
8:55 An expert has arrived who can help us with the event display. Hopefully he’ll be able to help once he’s had his coffee and is ready to face the day!
9:05 The regular shifter has left the room for five minutes… hopefully nothing will happen while he’s gone, I won’t know what to do!
9:48 The detector has been removed from the combined run because it needs to have some work done on it in the pit. We’ve moved to the Inner Detector control room, and at the moment we have nothing to do, so I’m doing other work on my laptop.
12:36 The detector is still off. We’ve been going over some of the steps for setting up a run at a more leisurely place. One of our colleagues came in and asked me to do a new scan analysis, so now I get to be the expert for a while and work on that.
3:01 In the last hour, they finally started switching on the detector, slowly to check on some “difficult” cooling loops. I got to help configure things and learn about that process.
In general, this was a pretty boring shift, but that happens sometimes. I’ll be back in training shift again on Monday, although I probably won’t bore you with another liveblog!
Tags: ATLAS, control room, pixel, shift
