BEAM!!!!!!
The relief is indescribable. I must have woken up one million times last night thinking, ‘Did we remember…’, ‘What about….’, ‘Did we do….’, ‘Let’s not forget….’.
All Tile experts converged to the control room around 7am, even though beam was not expect until 9:30am. The wait wasn’t so bad until about 9:15 when we had to stop the run and start afresh. Normally to stop the run and restart completely takes about 30 minutes. But every one was working at super human speeds, so we had the run going again at 9:29. At this point, I was absolutely pacing in the control room. I couldn’t hold still for a second.
The beam came to ATLAS (the last on the ring) around 10:20am. The first test they did was to smash the beam into one of the collimator. What we would expect to see in ATLAS is millions of muons flying into the detector. Which is exactly what we saw! The explanation of this picture isn’t important. What is important is that you can see lots and lots of stuff. Tons and tons of muons.
And now I can relax. Tile. After so much effort from so many people. It works. Just like we knew that it would. But still it is nice to actually see it working. And we can all take a deep breath of relief.
But check out google’s main page today! Here is a snapshot. Not every day your work gets to be on google!
On another note, this will also be my last posting. It has been a very fun year being able to describe my life in the control room and definitely being able to describe this day. In my place, my super-cool friend Kathy Copic (who is also a great cook) is now joining the USLHC blogging team, so keep an eye out for her posts.
And what about Tile? Where will we be? Well in usual Tile fashion we will be barbecuing. And the theme for tonight? ‘The Brazilians are back BBQ’! We are celebrating the return of many of our Brazilian colleagues.
Oh and there is beam. We’ll toast to that too!
