There is a status page, available on the web we watch while in our detector control room which shows what the LHC beam people are up to. This is a live, constantly updated picture.
What you have to remember is there are the accelerator people (LHC) and then there are the detector people (CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, ALICE…) and we’re all in separate control rooms far from each other. So the LHC, which provides the proton collisions, has to keep the detector people informed about what’s going to happen and when. This status page is one way of keeping the detector people informed.
The large graph in the middle (if there) shows the “intensity vs time” of the two proton beams (B1 & B2). Anything less than “1E9” is zero – no beam. While “intensity” is a count of number of protons in the beam, “energy” of these protons is a different thing, and listed at the top-center. At the time of this writing, I can see “E: 450 GeV”. That number will make it’s way up to 3,500 GeV in several weeks.
The “comments” box is also useful to watch, as it typically tells us what the LHC beam people are about to do. There, one might also see phrases like “beam dumped” which means the beam was purposefully thrown away – slammed into a giant wall underground. “Injection” means putting protons into an accelerator. If you’re curious, there is a full list of LHC acronyms you might see.
Keep an eye out for green “true” images in the lower right by “Stable Beam”, because that’s when we can have good proton collisions to record.
–Mike
Tags: control room, LHC
