And now I am sitting at the Hamburg airport on the way to Geneva and wait for a plane to take me to Switzerland. I have to join some more meetings at CERN, but so far there is no plane and we will be delayed by an minimum of one hour. But this is a modern world and I bought an hour of wifi access. And finally get around to continue my report on the setup of the beam telescope at the CERN test beam.
Ok, it is days later now since I started the blog and I did not report on the progress. But this does not mean that the beam never started but quite to contrary:
While I was driving back from Geneva to Hamburg (1057km) my colleagues actually collected 1.6 million events over the weekend. And since then another few million were added. Our little experiment is rather grown up in many ways. We can take data remotely, many little gizmo jobs were written to automatically copy the data to the GRID* and then only little work is needed to analyze the data. Within hours after the first data arrived, my team was already discussing the results.
Of course, as always, there is room for improvement. The telescope is not exactly sitting were it should be sitting. We have currently only a rather small sensor of roughly one square centimenter. If you put six of them behind each other with a minimum distance of 10cm, you have to be rather parallel to the beam not to decrease the actual active window. So here we have to be very precisely. But we do not have to rotate the whole telescope mechanics in order to do the needed rotation but the mechanics foresees already a tool to adjust for this little angles. We just have to rotate a little knob and then little adjustment can be done. The only problem is, to remember in which direction to turn the knob…..
(*the GRID consists of many computers to solve a single problem at the same time. These days it is widely used in particle physics and a real nice tool to analyse large amounts of data very fast … for more information look here)
