...that's a line from the movie "City Slickers". "Mitch" (Billy Crystal) says to "Curly" (Jack Palance), "Hi, Curly, kill anyone today?" and Curly responds, with a wicked grin on his face,...well, yes you guessed it: "Day ain't over yet!"
Turns out the excitement began even before I arrived around 7am at the Point 5 surface control room (SCR):
failure of a CRYO turbine at 4 Am caused helium loose in one of the DFB ( power feedboxes ) for sector 78: Turbine restarted , refilling of DFB on course, expected to be over by 8:30 ( ouf!) so that by that time they can start injection preparation.For myself it sure was exciting to be at there on the big day. Plenty of other people felt the same way. They said they would police the control room and keep out the hangers-on that didn't have actual shift responsibilities, but in the end they didn't have the heart to; which meant that the P5 SCR was barely controlled chaos.
Combine that with the monitors playing video (but no audio! Dang that was hard to deal with) from the LHC main control room and the other control rooms, and the fact that I had plenty of work to do throughout it all, and I guess you could say my attention was pretty fractured through all of it.
Events came fast and furiously. It wasn't long (~40 minutes?) after the official opening of ceremonies at 9:15am (this is a sort of special olympics for physicists) that LHC came "knocking on our door" - meaning that they injected beam 1 (the clockwise going beam as seen from above) into the ring only to be slammed into the closed collimators a scant 150m from CMS. Each time they do these "beam shots" into the closed collimators with something on the order of 10^9 450GeV protons, it creates a massive shower of particles that floods all of CMS and lights up the photodetectors like a virtual Christmas tree. Impressively, within minutes our event display had displays of example events on the monitors...
- but too late! By that time they had already opened the collimators and sent the next shot screaming past CMS (you could almost hear 'em) into the next sector beyond. Just half-an-hour later and they had completed their first goal, which was to have beam 1 make it's way completely around the ring.
(See here for examples of event displays and lots of other cool stuff. There are several pictures of colleagues of mine, both those that work on HCAL and those that hail from the U of M - this is also a blog with the most recent stuff at the top, so look for entries dated 10-Sep.)
After this some minor cryo issues cropped up for the LHC, but they managed to fix it in time to demonstrate beam 2 (the counter-clockwise beam) to circulate in the afternoon. All in all an unmitigated success for LHC and a great PR opportunity for all the experiments as well.
PR was obviously a big piece of the day. The Director General of CERN later reported,
The global media coverage for the event was unprecedented. There were over 300 journalists on site, Google news found over 3500 press cuttings on the day, not to mention featuring the LHC on the Google logo. Around 450 television stations picked up our broadcast signal. Eurovision has reported that it was broadcast over 2100 times. And our websites strained under the pressure of over 100 million hits. In our Member States and around the world, CERN was the lead news story on television news, even demoting the US elections to second place. Particle physics has never had such a high profile, and it gives us an opportunity over the coming years to get basic science back into the mainstream.We did in fact have one female reporter and a cameraman on hand in our control room, and also interviews were conducted over the video links. I managed to capture one of the video interviews with our technical coordinator using my puny digital camera. The video is broken up because I kept running out of memory and having to delete more old pictures to make room for more.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books
I'll have to say I didn't come too prepared to capture the events of the day. I quickly ran out of camera memory and didn't have enough to capture the toasting with champagne that happened later (you can see other pictures on the site linked above) or anything else after that. Here's a picture someone else took with yours truly with back to the camera.
It's great fun to participate in such an enormous event such as this. And fun to see us on the front page of Google!
It's really one of the main reasons why I wanted to move out here, to be near the locus of history being made; but really, when work has to get done, best to leave the press out of it...So developments have continued at a brisk pace since then: Thursday night brought an even more significant achievement in that the machine operators were able to "capture" beam 1, meaning that they could control the circulating bunch of protons, keep it coherent and keep it circulating for up to half-an-hour. But now this weekend more cryo problems have cropped up all around the ring and we've been mostly without beam the whole weekend, which has given us opportunities to attend to other pressing issues...
Okay, so maybe now the day is over...
Take care,
-PKBD
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