5 day forecast: sunny with a chance of collisions

...must be because of global warming! (I'll say it again: after this winter, if the globe gets any warmer I'm going to freeze to death...)

Hello, all,
Just a brief note to keep you apprised of the situation here: Since the return from winter shutdown the LHC machine people have been working feverishly to get the LHC back up and running. The decision-makers took their annual trip to Chamonix at the end of January and decided there that between two scenarios,

1. one long run (18 months) at half the design energy, followed by a another long shutdown (18 months) to upgrade the machine and replace all the interconnects (the component that failed in 2008), or
2. several short runs with short shutdowns interspersed,

they chose scenario #1.

In the last month they have been circulating particles around the ring and exercising the magnets, ramping the current up and down. Just last Friday they broke their own world record for highest energy collider particles - 3.5 TeV per beam, the energy for collisions in scenario #1.

However, they reserve the actual first collisions at this energy for the big "Media Event". I guess the commissioning has been going well enough that they have now committed to their tentative date: next Tuesday (mark your calendars!), March 30th, starting at 7a.m. local time. (They refuse to collide particles at 3.5TeV before then because they know that among thousands of collaborators someone is not going to be able to keep their mouth shut, or their itchy blogging fingers - try to say that ten times fast - but not in polite company - from giving it away - hey, don't look at me! I barely have time to even be doing this - and then the media won't come, and that would be just the worst thing in the world. Did you follow all that? :) So for the time being the beams scream by each other (can you hear them?), missing by mere fractions of a somethingerother, and on Tuesday they skootch'em over just a skosh and KABOOM! collisions. This will be like the media event we had on September 10, 2008. So Play it Again, Sam! Fire up your web browsers and follow the excitement!

http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics

http://www.lhcportal.com/

http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cmscc/cmstv/cmstv.jsp?channel=2

Actually, they are also planning for collisions at a lower energy this weekend - been planning them for a few weeks now, but the media event takes precedence of course, and I'm slated to be in the control room for this one. We're putting our detector through a phase scan to determine the optimal time settings for synchronous arrival of data. Looks like I'll be burning the owl-shift oil for this while we switch over to daylight savings time sometime early Sunday morning.

Maybe you'll be able to see me here at that time (late afternoon-evening in the U.S.):

http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/Media/CMSeye/cam7.html

See you on the other side...

-P

Update: not even 24 hours after the original posting, they moved the low energy collisions from Sunday morning owl shift to Monday morning owl shift. I'd lay odds these collisions will be canceled altogether.