Howdy lovers,

Well, today’s the day!  The LHC people have decided, along with all the experimenters, that it’s time to collide some protons at 7 TeV.  Actually, the hoopla was originally scheduled to start this morning at 09h00 (CERN time).  That plan was amended several times, so that physicists I talked to all had different ideas of the actual start time for colliding the beams (I heard 03h00 at some point).  The initial attempts this morning to ramp the beam have both failed due to unforeseen errors in the quench protection system (QPS) and some other electronics, but they’re now saying they expect beam (and collisions!) to be ready around noon or 13h00.  So, that means that our early risers in the US might be privy to all the good shit.

For your viewing pleasure, we’ve compiled a list of links to various webcasts broadcasting the day’s activities:

• LHC First Physics Webcast (be sure to click around to the various webcams, at the bottom of the page)
• Our beloved OP Vistars (Page1 is often the most informative)
• CMS cameras: One Two Three
• ATLAS public page, home to a nice feed and some pretty pictures
• ATLAS event displays
• A pretty informative CERN Twitter feed
• The LHC Announcer (this dude talks to you about the LHC activities)

So, click away.  We’ll try to keep you updated, maybe copying some of the pretty photos of the day here for you to see.  Let us know if you find other interesting webcasts to link here, either by commenting or by e-mailing dipole@cernlove.org.

Happy collisions!

UPDATE: We have collisions!  At 13h22, the LHC people declared “STABLE BEAMS,” and we’ve been seeing 7 TeV collisions ever since.  The press release is here, and the champagne is everywhere.

Some of our readers not plugged-in to the everyday scene of physics at the high energy frontier might be confused remembering that we promised you some bad-ass proton collision action somewhere around 14 February, which was over a month ago, and realizing that, indeed, the beloved 7 TeV data is still nowhere to be found.  In fact, the media has been so focused on the 1-year shutdown expected for the LHC in 2012 (and seriously, it’s not because of the Mayan calendar…) that no one has really posed the obvious question: “Umm, hey… wasn’t there supposed to be stuff happening already this year?”

Have no fear, friends.  Your friendly LHC scientists are simply making sure they are working with a well-oiled machine, and these kinds of delays are completely normal.  January and February were used for commissioning the machine at low current, and further developing the Quench Protection System (QPS); here’s a nice article by SymmetryBreaking giving some more information about the LHC’s QPS.  Having a robust protection against accidents such as the one in September 2008 is clearly a high priority.  Beam was re-introduced to the LHC a few weeks ago, and the progress is steadily imrpvoing, however carefully the technicians are working.

Tonight is a special night, however.  For the first time in 2010, we are witnessing the LHC dry-ramping* to the current which corresponds to a 3.5 TeV proton energy; this is the target energy for collisions in the 2010-2011 run.  Of course, live coverage is brought to you by OP Vistars.  In case you missed it, here’s a snapshot in the early stage of the ramp.

(*Dry-ramping implies the current in the magnets of the LHC are being ramped up, but that there is no proton beam circulating at the time.)

Kick the tires and light the fires.

We here at CERN Love are as giddy as schoolgirls about this.

We have already noted that “the building numbers here don’t make a damn bit of sense. If they do follow any kind of scheme, it’s not a scheme that helps you find buildings.” So, suppose you have a workshop to attend in the AB auditorium in building 6.  You might know where building 5 is, but one learns very quickly that that sort of information doesn’t do you the tiniest bit of good at CERN. Instead, your only resource is undoubtedly the ancient “WWW Map” of CERN.

(By the way, I once spent twenty minutes wandering the halls of building 6 trying to find the infamous AB auditorium.  Not to be outdone, at CERN the room numbers can be just as confusing as the building numbers.)

I actually find CERN’s building map page mostly effective and a cute little throwback to a time before Google Maps.  It’s the horseshoe crab of web pages, ugly but effective. Go ahead and open Netscape 1.0 (or maybe something even older) and find yourself a building, if that happens to be your thing. It’s all just GIFs and links (image maps are used in some places, but not nearly as much as you would expect), and most of the time it gets you where you need to go.

Of course though, there are some serious and silly limitations,

• Clicking top map zooms out revealing the only other zoom level available.  Clicking bottom maps inexplicably takes you back to the home page. Panning is never an option.
• If you land in the Prevessin site the bottom right map doesn’t indicate this at all. From the home page try CERN Clubs Spaces > Picnic area; if you don’t have an inkling that this is on the Prevessin site then you are going to be very confused for a while.
• The orientations of the other two maps are not consistent with the the overview map in the bottom right (the only one with north properly straight up). Why they did this I don’t have a clue; my only guess is that they wanted to layout the Meyrin site a little more horizontally. This is a big reason why the previous picnic area example is so confusing, the shape of the Prevessin site is not as obvious when presented in multiple orientations.
• At least at first glance, there are no simple everything-in-a-pdf versions of the maps. There is a very prominent link to a 3D PDF that takes a while to download and render, after which you realize the 3D in this case is a useless gimmick. I have run across a PDF with 3D content a total of zero times outside of this page; there must be a very good reason for this. Actually, there are PDF maps of all the sites, but the only place you can find them is via a very subtle link at the bottom of the map page after you have clicked on a point of interest or searched for a building. There is no link at all from the main page.  (Contrary to what it says, they are accessible outside of CERN, one slightly pleasant surprise.)

Hoping to discover what other information might be available, I found my way to the GS Department Patrimony and Site Information page. The page is littered with promising links that when poked reveal themselves to be dead and rotting. But, there is one handy find: a GPS navigation page provides a CSV file with the latitude and longitude of all the buildings for uploading to your navigation system. (Relevant to the discussion in our building number post, there is also a page listing the construction date of each of the buildings, but that page is not accessible outside of CERN so I won’t bother linking.)

Finally, a tip: keep watching CERN Love. We are working on a geographical component to the site that hopefully will be handy and informative. We also hope to publish some interactive informational pages that will be very relevant to the start up of the LHC. Both should appear in the next couple weeks.

One disgruntled physicist who sits in Building 40 is fed up.  Remind me to never leave my coffee dishes anywhere near this dude(ette).

Public spaces NOT to be used for dish storage.

If we're not testing the parameters of the standard model, we sure as hell are testing each other's patience...

The highest energy accelerators in the world cover a lot of ground. The LHC tunnel passes mostly hidden under pasture and a few small farms, but even right in the middle of the laboratories, assembly buildings, and offices of CERN’s Meyrin site one finds a flock of sheep. The sheep rotate through a few disjoint grassy patches small enough that I really start to wonder if it’s worth the trouble.  CERN’s sibling over in the US, Fermilab, hosts on its grounds some even more substantial farm and wildlife: bison, horses, deer (though the population was heavily culled a few years back to make the roads safer) and some ponds well stocked with fish and frequented by herons.

At least one person has relayed the speculation that the animals are primarily present to allay local’s fears of radiation: if sheep can spend all day snacking on top of an accelerator then how dangerous can it be? The problem I have with this theory is that it makes no mention of the scientists who spend just as much time in just as much proximity to our scary science stuff.  Does the public honestly think we are so driven to distraction by our whizzing particles that we might very well hang our balls in the beam to see if it tickles?  Let me go on record and say definitively, no, we are not.

Below I present evidence of how deadly serious the Fermilab-CERN competition is.

Sheep take shelter under CERN's ISR overpass near one of the LHC assembly building.

One of my many coyote sightings at Fermilab

Potential for future study:

1. Apply a Lotka–Volterra model to the CERN and Fermilab scientific populations.
2. Cite this blog post as the only motivation.
3. Win Ig Nobel prize (for a physicist of my meager stature, the equivalent of ‘profit’).

That is unless one of our five highly esteemed readers scoops me on this. I dare you.

]]> http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/farm-life-and-accelerators/feed/ 4 46.234192121287 6.0431858897209 http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/1421/ http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/1421/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:00:10 +0000 lovehurts http://www.cernlove.org/blog/?p=1421

Today, this was the definition of the “ambience” in CERN’s Building 40.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was being sabotaged.

Hear the atmosphere which is so conducive to productive work at CERN.

Open-air Batiment 40

The LHC will employ the use of 1,232 dipole magnets, which are cooled to superconducting temperatures by liquid helium at 2 Kelvin and will provide magnetic fields as strong as 8.33 Tesla.  As one might imagine, these puppies are valuable.  To string two of them together, without interrupting the circuits through which currents as high as 11,850 Amps will flow, requires a highly sophisticated splice mechanism which must have a resistance of less than 0.000080 Ω for the machine to work properly.

Otherwise, this happens.

Of course, since CERN decided to display these magnificent beasts prominently (including one proudly and boldly showcased on the otherwise beautiful green lawn outside CERN’s Restaurant 1), they had to find a way to protect their valuable end-connections.  These are the blag end-plugs you see in this photo of the lawn dipole.

Well, I suppose CERN had a spare endcap.  I would never have been creative enough to devise this plan for its fate.

Another magnet cover-gone-planter.

It really ties the room together.

Every unused parking lot and road side is a potential scrapyard, and CERN is blessed with a lot of strange junk. Here’s a random example. Any ideas what this was?

My 2010 New Year’s resolution is to eat/drink/inhale all my food/liquid/oxygen through this HOT AIR 160° C FOOD HOSE.

A quiet Christmas

The winter shutdown has begun. CERN closes its doors, turns off the heat, and stops doing physics for two full weeks, starting today. And CERN Love will do the same.

It’s time to say good-bye to 2009 — an epic year — and prepare ourselves for the next stage of CERN craziness.  We here at CERN Love have appreciated all your support and willingness to laugh a bit at a place which we are truly lucky to be associated with, but one which is pretty fucking weird.  We’ll be on holidays ourselves, trying to party as hard as our colleagues… and it appears we won’t be missing much here at the lab →

The LHC is expected to come back to life near Valentine’s Day/Chinese New Year, 2010 (that is 14 February for those of you who are neither consumers of greeting cards printed in China nor printers of greeting cards printed in China).  Don’t worry, CERN Love is expected to come back to life much sooner, around 6 January, shortly after work begins again at CERN.

CERN Love would like to extend our heartfelt season’s greetings to you and yours.  As a small gift to you, we attach a gallery of pictures from current and past winters in Geneva (including Fête de l’Escalade) and CERN.

Love,

CERN Love