Quantum Diaries

I was on shift all week at ATLAS.  When I signed up for these shifts, I thought perhaps we would be looking at collisions, but well, things weren’t quite that exciting.  Actually, for me they weren’t that exciting at all since I was at the Liquid Argon Calorimeter desk, and our detector wasn’t being read out for most of the week.  This was to allow ATLAS to write out more data in a short time.  The calorimeter data volume is quite large and our calorimeter wasn’t the focus of these studies.  Seth was sitting at the Pixel desk, and things seemed a bit more interesting there as they were recording lots of tracks.

ATLAS was recording cosmic muon data this week.  I heard there were at least 50 million events recorded, some with the magnets on and some with the magnets off.  This will be extremely useful for calibration and alignment. The data with the magnets on will contain information about muons turning as they are influenced by the magnetic field. The momentum of these muons can be calculated and compared to expectations as a nice cross-check.  The data with the magnets off will contain muons that don’t bend, and therefore draw straight lines through the ATLAS detector.  This is useful for checking the alignment between different detectors.

As of Thursday night, ATLAS is taking data with the entire detector writing out data, and will continue like this for the rest of October.  This will probably be the best data we have taken yet.  It can be studied for a few months to have us in really great shape for next year’s running with collisions.

After November 3, we won’t run much with the full detector until next year.  The detector will be opened up and people will be allowed in for maintenance, things like repairing or replacing problematic power supplies and malfunctioning pieces of electronics.

The folks at Cosmic Variance are taking part in the 2008 DonorsChoose Blogger challenge, in which various blogs pick worthy school projects to list, and invite their readers to fund them:

It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

Of course, the US/LHC blogs can’t possibly take an official side in such a competition, or be any kind of “affiliate” — we’d have to get a dozen bloggers to agree, and for all I know mail some kind of form in triplicate to NSF and DOE as well. (Ok, the latter probably isn’t true.) But if you want my personal opinion, you should give money through Cosmic Variance’s page, because (a) I like an underdog, and (b) I took a course in General Relativity with Sean Carroll a few years back, and it was pretty good.

But no matter which side of the great divide between between Cosmic Variance and Science Blogs you happen to be on — or even, dare I say it, which side of the upcoming presidential election — we can all agree that it’s a good thing to send a bit of money to motivated teachers who want to give their students a little something extra. Take a look!

Yesterday, the CERN Director-General spoke to the laboratory about the present and future of the laboratory (the slides in English, and video in French, are here). He said a couple of important things.

1. Maintenance of infrastructure previously scheduled for the winter shutdown will instead start on Monday, October 6.  This means that an effort is being made to re-start the accelerator complex in April instead of the previously scheduled June.  That is good news for getting collisions sooner rather than later in 2009.  But presumably everything depends on repairs being finished in the LHC.
2. Concerning the LHC, a report will be issued before the inauguration on October 21 detailing what happened on September 19, and again presumably will let us know how long repairs are expected to take.

One of Michelangelo Mangano‘s lectures described how delivering kicks to a proton dislodges gluons from their otherwise invisible lives. Please note the ISR (Initial State Radiation) in this painting, which was also inspired by the quantum field theorists’ success in doing away with all those nice little Greek-style “atoms”; apparently, reality is now made up of identity-less “excitations” of some fundamental “stuff”.

In other words: Pending the repair of the LHC, some of the less immediately useful members of the collaboration (a.k.a. yours truly) has reverted to armchair philosophy and the occasional excursion into physics.

Or… not really. Do tell the boss that this blogger still remains:

• a graduate student of UCSB
• working hard (ahem) on triggers / dataset definitions plus whatnot
• getting a Beyond Standard Model search ready for launch
• (incidentally?) setting up groundwork for thesis