While my family and I are spending a year at CERN, our Subaru Outback is sitting in the garage in Lincoln, under a plastic cover and hooked up to a trickle charger. We think that we hooked it all up right before going, but it’s hard to know for sure. Will the car start again when we get home? We don’t know.
CMS is in a similar situation. The detector was operating just fine when the LHC run ended at the start of 2013, but now we aren’t using it like we did for the previous three years. It’s basically under a tarp in the garage. When proton collisions resume in 2015, the detector will have to be in perfect working order again. So will this car start after not being driven for two years?
Fortunately, we can actually take this car out for a drive. This past week, CMS performed an exercise known as the Global Run in November, or GRIN. (I know, the acronym. You are wondering, if it didn’t go well, would we call it FROWN instead? That too has an N for November.) The main goal of GRIN was to make sure that all of the components of CMS could still operate in concert. In fact, many pieces of CMS have been run during the past nine months, but independently of one another. Actually making everything run together is a huge integration task; it doesn’t just happen automatically. All of the readouts have to be properly synchronized so that the data from the entire detector makes sense. In addition, GRIN was a chance to test out some operational changes that the experiment wants to make for the 2015 run. It may sound like it is a while away, but anything new should really be tested out as soon as possible.
On Friday afternoon, I ran into some of the leaders of the detector run coordination team, and they told me that GRIN had gone very well. At the start, not every CMS subsystem was ready to join in, but by the end of the week, the entire detector was running together, for the first time since the end of collisions. Various problems were overcome along the way — including several detector experts getting trapped in a stuck elevator. But they believe that CMS is in a good position to be ready to go in 2015.
As a member of CMS, that was really encouraging news. Now, if only the run coordinators could tell me where I left the Subaru keys!
Tags: CMS
