As the time approaches for the reinitiation of LHC operations, we are starting to feel the excitement of this grandiose experiment again.
With the Tevatron’s first direct constraint on the mass of the Higgs boson beyond good-old LEP’s this past week, physicists in all LHC experiments are getting ready and more excited to re-start operations and finally gather some data that allow them to search for new physics and hopefully complement or surpass very quickly the astonishing Tevatron results. Meanwhile, LHC physicists and engineers are finalizing the improvements in the quench protection systems that will allow us to run at the energy of 3.5 TeV/beam, starting middle February.
My two cents, as always, consists of collaborating in putting the CMS trigger system in the best condition possible to start taking good data. This time though, we are using “real” data from last year’s operations as opposed to using “simulated” data. No more relying entirely on Monte Carlo, no more tweaking and tuning and speculating about our computer simulations. This is the real deal guys!!
What we do with the data is to skim it off-line into a collection of good and interesting events, then we feed them into our on-line system and run the trigger menu to check its performance. These data has all the information, event by event, that the detector collected (in the form of electronic signals) from those proton-proton collisions we had last year. For these past month or so, we have been capable of touching nature’s primary constituents over and over in order to adapt our detectors and tune them to be able to better sense the most fantastic petals of life: particles!
Edgar Carrera (Boston University)
