The last few weeks have been absolutely crazy for me and are a great reflection of my life and times as a physics gradstudent. In the last three weeks I’ve managed to finally acquire the full data set that will be my thesis, give the first of a series of talks on the validation and calibration of this data set, then have receive friends and family from all over the world for my wedding, then travel to Barcelona and Mallorca Spain for my honeymoon where I got to do some amazing climbing/cycling/ and relaxing before racing back to Chicago to be on shift at Fermilab
At "The Arch" in Mallorca doing some deep water soloing
So I’m back after a bit of a break and on shift here at CDF. Late last year I completed my first round of “ACE” shifts and now I’m back to do the much less stressful job of “consumer operator”. The ACE is the primary person in charge of running the data acquisition and high voltage systems for all of the components that make up the detector and having the proper experts contacted when something goes haywire. This can be a stressful job, since you don’t want to lose one second of colliding beams and often when things go wrong there are twenty errors, alarms going off, and you are only somewhat familiar (at best) with the way everything works.
My current job (the consumer operator) is much less stressful. I mostly check the data in the form of plotted histograms and compare them against what we expect them to look like. This is done to insure that the data we are recording and the ACE is working so hard to keep coming into the system isn’t tainted because of some piece of hardware acting strangely.
Snapshot of the CDF control room
I really enjoy my time as CO since I get to meet the new Aces, talk with the Scientific Coordinator (SciCo), and see the experts as they get called in and learn something new about my experiment while a problem is being fixed. Additionally, there is really no feeling quite like that of being part of the team that is bringing in High Energy Physics (HEP) data that will eventually advance our understanding of our universe. Really quite a cool thing!
So while it is a bit of a shock to the system to go from data analysis to wedding to honeymoon to back on shift…it is one of the crazy aspects of being in the world of particle physics that you must wear many hats and I consider myself luck to be part of it all.
Me and my bride!
