Cold, Wet and Busy

Hello all,

May 11th was our last entry?? Only two entries in all of May? Man, you can tell when you've been busy by trying to keep a blog. Not that we haven't noticed...The three subsequent weekends were swamped with work in preparation for the following Monday. And when you have to get work done for Monday it takes away prime blogging time. (There are many holidays in France and Switzerland, as I have previously blogged, but Memorial Day isn't one of them. VE day is, though.)

The first two weekends I was preparing for a talk I was supposed to give on the status of my physics analysis - "e+Jets+MET SM Background Study: Status". It involves using computer simulation data of the LHC and CMS to try to figure out in advance how best to distinguish new physics processes like supersymmetry from "background" processes that are already known, from "the Standard Model". After pecking away for months at this - other more pressing work was keeping me busy too - I really didn't have any money plots to show for it, just a lot of underlying infrastructure that was put in place. So, good thing, I suppose: on that first Monday the meeting time ran out and my talk got postponed for a week. But that meant another weekend of burning the midnight oil trying to put together slides that showed a little more progress - whatever little progress can be made in a week, anyway. That talk went off okay, and I have a list of new things to try.

Then a week ago that other pressing work required preparing a release of software that I'm responsible for.

Kathy's been keeping busy too. Just this last week she had appointments every day of the week - some therapy appointments for Ben and some for herself, like the Monday morning French class and Tuesday morning women's Bible study.

And Ben is busy with his newfound crawling ability, busy exploring all the nooks and crannies of the apartment where he shouldn't be going! Measures have been taken...You can see new videos of his exploits on our dropshots web site.

Good thing we're all busy too, because the weather has turned foul. Cloudy, drippy and cold -


right now, Saturday morning, it's 54degF. The lack of sun is starting to fray people's nerves. (We heard the story of the neighbor lady of a friend's showing up unannounced at their door with kids in tow, saying: I can't take it anymore!) It's one thing I've noticed about this area - the weather gets stuck in patterns. Back last fall it was cloudy and cold for weeks, then after we got back from holidays it was sunny and mild (for the season) for weeks. Now we're in a Seattle pattern again. The ten day weather forecast looks rather grim. I think some weekend trips are going to become essential for restoring sanity...

Before the weather turned nasty we got a chance to go on a small trip up to Divonne, not far from here. "Divonne-les-Bains" as Wikipedia says, is a resort town - in fact "les Bains" can be loosely translated into English as "Springs", as in "Colorado Springs". They have thermal baths. Casinos, too. But we just spent time at the (man-made) lakeshore park:






And once the weather turns bad, if you can't go outside, why not go underground? I took Kathy on a personal tour of CMS on the last day of May, better than the one she got during the Open Days. I took mostly movies on the tour - if there's interest, I can post them on the dropshots website; otherwise I think I'll just add them to my other tour movies and make one big DVD of them all.

Here's Kathy in the surface control center - new "C&C" chairs have been ordered, I see. The second phase of "CRuZeT" ("Cosmic RUn at ZEro Tesla") is rapidly approaching, and I have one shift scheduled in this control center this week.


Downstairs things are drawing inevitably nearer to turn-on, scheduled for next month. The big news is that the beam pipe for the LHC (that's the pipe that actually carries the two counter-rotating proton beams around the 27km ring) is being installed through CMS and "baked out". You can see it in these last two pictures. In the first one, right behind me you can see "HF-" - that's the Hadron Calorimeter-Forward, minus side - pulled out of its garage (Kathy is standing in the garage taking the picture). In order to get HF- out of its garage, the endcap disks had to be shoved nearer their final "closed" destination, towards the barrel. The +/- HFs both have also to be raised on platforms so that the beampipe can pass through the center of them, before closure is considered complete. Above HF- is the beampipe coming out of the side of the cavern above me and plunging into the heart of CMS...

...and out the other side. Here's a picture of the plus side beam pipe installation. The endcap disks on the plus side (on the right) have not yet been moved to closed (left).


Having the beampipe installed now means that jockeying the endcap disks to closed position is all that more delicate a procedure. Imagine trying to move these thousand-ton disks and maintaining centimeter or better accuracy, so as not to damage anything. The "bake-out", as far as I understand, is something that helps keep molecules from the piping itself from outgassing into the pipe and getting in the way of those lightning-fast protons screaming around the ring.

Take care,
-PKBD