D-Day Approaches: A Dude's Digest

Folks, we're getting down to crunch time, and there's so much going on to get ready it's hard to summarize it all. Here's one dude's attempt, anyway...

In this digest, you will find:

• Goings on up till now
  
• Perhaps some of the last pictures I will ever take inside the experimental cavern
• Time, time, time - a breakdown of the schedule of events
• Top ten (or so) things not to say or do to the media on The Big Day (TM).

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Goings-on/pictures

During "Cruzet4" (Cosmic RUn at ZEro Tesla, the 4th), I took three shifts. On Friday August 22, I had a chance to kick around the cavern after shift and take some pictures (click on any one of these for a bigger version). The minus end was still "open" and being worked.


The "plus end" was closed and they had taken the Hadron Forward (HF) calorimeter plus end out of its garage to be prepped for elevation to its final position.


Here's a video of goings-on in the cavern. In the third segment you see the HF being split in half for some maintenance work, being prepped for elevation to its final position. I was told that the siren going off during the segment is a "beam imminent" siren. No one is really paying attention to it, though, because while the LHC was doing beam insertion tests, there was no way the beam was going to reach us at Point 5.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books
I had another shift on Sunday morning. Not the best shift to pull necessarily, but it doesn't happen too often, and it's better than owl shift! This particular day was the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, and thankfully someone had tuned in to a live web cast of them and put it on one of the big monitors. It was the most Olympics I had gotten a chance to see. The French didn't show them tape-delayed in the evening.


After the Sunday shift was over, I drove home on the road less traveled and noticed that Mt Blanc was putting on a show of its own. The picture doesn't do justice to the clarity of the tableau that day.


The week before last were our first magnet tests with the CMS assembled. Each night they ramped up the CMS magnet to increasing (albeit partial) field values. We still haven't had a chance to test the magnet at full field yet! That comes Monday.

Then this last week was our last "mid-week global run" (MWGR) before the start of beam; on Wednesday (3rd) I was at Point 5, not taking shift but helping to get ready for beam, and I got a chance to go down and take what will possibly be the last pictures I take in the cavern.

By this time they had been feverishly working to finish elevating the two "HCAL Forward" (HF) detectors up from the ground floor on raiser platforms, and then closing the beam pipe shielding so that it dovetails nicely with the HFs in position. Compare and contrast to the previous photos :)


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Pictures from these dates and more have been recently added to our dropshots website.

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Time, time, time...

To reiterate for people: LHC is the particle collider itself, the 27km ring around which the protons fly. Around the ring are four experiments, of which the experiment I work on, CMS, is one. The experiments are each designed with different purposes in mind, to analyze different aspects of the collisions that the LHC will produce. I work on one "subdetector" in CMS, called the Hadron Calorimeter, or HCAL for short. HCAL itself consists of "sub-subdetectors" (although we don't use that phrase): the barrel (HB), endcaps (HE), outer (HO) and forward (HF).

LHC schedule dictates to some extent the CMS schedule, which dictates the HCAL schedule. September 10th is primarily an LHC event. The goal of September 10th for LHC is to circulate one bunch of protons a few (millions of) times - each orbit takes only ~90 microseconds - first in one direction and then in the opposite direction. There will be no collisions as of yet. Since the 10th is a big media event, another goal is to show off a successfully working LHC and "kick off the LHC era" of high energy physics.

The first goal for CMS is not to get in the way of LHC goals! The second goal is to "see" the beam and help the LHC folks tune the beam as necessary. A third goal is to protect CMS from any stray beam particles from damaging our equipment before it really gets a chance to be used. So we activate only the most durable parts of our system.

We are also participating in the media aspects of the 10th. Media is anticipated at the remote "CMS Center" in Meyrin, and my adviser is one of the spokespeople tapped to interact with the media. I thought I heard that there may also be a BBC cameraman at the Point 5 control room.

As of this writing they are pumping the portion of beam pipe which passes through our sector down to a vacuum. Once that's done they can open the gates within the pipe to the rest of the ring so that protons can pass through. The "turbo-molecular pumps" (yeah, we got those too, aren't we kewl!) are expected to finish pumping early Monday morning (8th).

Immediately after that, the all-together-CMS will (for the first time!) attempt to "ramp-up" (or as some of our non-native-English-speaking shifters say, "rump up") its solenoid magnet (the "S" in CMS) up to operational field of 3.8 Tesla - the most energetic magnet of its type ever made - and then test the fast discharge system. (At full field there is enough energy stored in the magnetic field to melt 18 tons of gold - but it isn't like we actually have 18 tons of gold around every time we want to turn off the field and dissipate all that energy; there is a system, and for safety reasons that system must be tested and commissioned.) HCAL has a very carefully planned procedure for testing the HO during ramp-up of the field and the other subsystems at "flat-top" before the discharge.

On Tuesday (9th) we start a "global run" of all subdetectors and attempt to achieve stable running which will continue up to the big event on the 10th.

One of the nice things about having the adviser that I have is that at the University of Minnesota he designed the "HF technical trigger", one of the trigger systems that can be used to see early beam, using the HF subdetector (pictured and discussed above). We've been involved in commissioning this system over the last several weeks. Another nice thing is that he is in a position to have gotten me assigned to the "expert shifter" position on the 9th and 10th in the Point 5 control room. I will particularly be helping to analyze data coming from the HF technical trigger, which is one of the pieces of CMS that is durable enough to be operated at the start of beam, and can be used to see beam particles.

After September 10th, we are told that first collisions of 900 GeV protons may come as soon as a scant 10 days away. But that itself is a brief stopping point on the way 5TeV collisions. No word yet that I've seen on an estimate for that.

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Media training...

Some of you may or may not have heard of the brouhaha about some of the doomsday scenarios being propagated through the internet about ways the LHC could end life as we know it - well: life, period! If you're susceptible to worry about these kind of things, read no further. Or else google them, if you want, there's more than enough material! (Here's a recent example - the FoxNews version of this article has a couple gross distortions right off the bat, didn't survey the other news outlets).

But this sort of thing certainly lends itself to some much needed humor.

...so much so, in fact, that the CMS management has, in true 21st century fashion, provided media training for those spokespeople who will be interacting with the media on D-Day. They've stressed over and over that there must be not even the slightest hint of humor, tongue-in-cheek or otherwise. Straight as an arrow, we must play it - you're not cracking a smile, are you??? Better not! So us physicists with a waggish bent (yes, there are some of us), must find alternative outlets for our humor.

In that spirit, then, herewith are the top ten (or so) things one must not say or do to the media that come to cover this event. Some of these I thought up, and some I heard other people suggesting:

• Invite them to your "End of the World" party - yes, there actually are some scheduled for September 10th!
  
• Wear your "We're all going to die" t-shirt
• Say, "You ever see 'The Planet of the Apes'? 'Dr. Strangelove'?"
• Change the event display to show a black circle growing out of the center of CMS and taking over the whole screen. And then say,...
• "it's been nice knowin' ya."
• "Hope you have your final affairs arranged. But I guess it won't matter if they're not."
• "Omigod! They said it could never happen, but it is!"
• "BLAAAACKK HOOOOOOLLE!!!! RRRRRRUUUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!"
• Start a chant with the Atlas team: "We've got black holes, yes we do! We've got black holes, how 'bout you? We got more! We got more!"

On a different tack...

• "Now witness the destructive firepower of this fully armed and operational particle collider! Fire at will, commander!"*
  
• "First we take out the moon, then we blackmail the nations to give us whatever we want. What do you want? I can get you a new Ferrari, you want a new Ferrari? 'Cause I'm gettin' a new Ferrari..."

Got any other contributions to this list? Comment on this blog! Click on "N comments" (not, repeat, not the little envelope!) where N is some number (or on "Post a comment" if you've clicked on an individual blog entry from previously), type away, select Anonymous, and then publish.

In actuality, there's not a chance in Hades that the world will end on Wednesday (not because of the LHC, anyway!), there won't even be any collisions. And the first collisions 10 days hence or so will be at energies already tested at other colliders. So cool your jets, you have at least a couple of weeks yet...

Meanwhile, if you want to follow the festivities, CERN has it's own webcast site, http://webcast.cern.ch. See the previous blog entry for more links.

Take care, see you in the afterlife,
-PKBD

*(We probably have a few theorists that could play the role to a tee...)