The first paper from the CMS collaboration has been posted to arXiv. (It has also been submitted for review at a real-life journal!) It discusses how aligning part of the detector using a few hundred million cosmic rays was successfully done.
The text of the paper itself is 20-some pages. And the author list? Almost the same size. It includes people from 160 institutions around the world (48 of those are in the US).
There’s even a special footnote to mark those that have deceased – and there are several in a list this long.
Alignment of the machine is an important early step to having a detector we can use to make physics discoveries. Congratulations to everyone.
PS: Does anyone know how many of the authors are graduate students? If I made a completely naïve assumption that the whole author list contains the same fraction of grad students as just my institution, then that would be a fraction of 8/32 for a total of about 600 graduate students in the CMS collaboration.
Tags: CMS
Quote: “Does anyone know how many of the authors are graduate students?”
The answer you are looking for is actually available from iCMS. I checked a couple of statistics and found the answer is 725 with 548 can sign publications. US institutions alone have a total of 265 students ! The numbers are quite fantastic !
How many dead people does it take to align a detector?
Now I think we know.