The LHC dumped it’s last fill for the year today at 10:20. The scheduled shutdown wasn’t until 18:00, but they couldn’t get another set of lead ions spinning by then (you can see a small spike around 14:00 below when particles were injected but a “trip” dumped the beam before acceleration began). So, we won’t see new collisions until sometime in March and in the meantime there will be much repairing and updating to both the accelerator and detector.

It was a great year for the LHC and there is nothing but exciting things to expect from the coming year!

It’s so cute when the cafeteria dudes up for a theme week. A few weeks ago we got a mounted bison head, old-West wanted posters, the stars-and-stripes pinned over the crêpe station, and a mannequin wearing chaps and moccasins. Oh, and the only thing vaguely relevant on the menu seemed to be bison haché (bison burgers sans buns–sans buns!).

As I gaze over the beautiful vineyards of Switzerland cradled by French mountains forming a feathered edge in the sunset haze, and as I work into the night trying hard to fully understand one slice of the most energetic particle collisions man has ever produced, this physicist’s thoughts are unfortunately nowhere near Europe and the LHC.

In a few minutes the Fermilab Tevatron Collider (that’s the offical name it gets in all our papers) will be permanently shut down (with a live broadcast and party). I have to diverge from our regularlly scheduled CERN Love to some FNAL Love for a moment.

The Economist’s article “So long and thanks for all the quarks” is a wonderful little ride, from its Douglas Adams opening, snapping every nerd to attention, to its teary, confused, excited ending. We physicists are a very pratical lot; if we are Americans and we can only get our particle collisions in Europe, well then it’s time for more baguettes and cheese!  But, from a wider view you really start to wonder if the US is going to be just a bit more lost without such Great Things such as the space shuttle program or the Tevatron.

I spent some time at FNAL, and though I will never miss its cafeteria (“cheap” is the only positive thing I was ever able say) and the lifeless surounding surburbs, it was and still is a little bit magical place. Arriving at dawn, earlier than most, for the start of a shift in the detector control room you might creep past a coyote hopping in and out of the roadside furrows on a hunt. Waiting in shot-setup, as the antiprotons that were created and carefully stored over the entire last night are finally slipped into the Tevatron ring, you tense a little as as you listen to the audio cues from the accelerator. There is a whooosh as each set of bunches load (was that a photon torpedo or an X-wing blast?), sometime later a robot voice announces “ac-cel-er-a-tion,” and finally “col-li-der state: high energy physics.” Later, maybe there will a beer at Two Brother’s Tap House or even a trip into Chicogo (with so much more to offer than Geneva). Always new details of nature to nail down. Always more plots to make. Always more data, until now.

Damn-it, did I just get something in my eye?

The Economist asks, is the future of high energy physics now “For all mankind?” I hope to God or Nature it is. What we do across the praries of Batavia or under the small towns and dairy farms of the Pays de Gex is both very human and very incredible. I wish every last person some taste of it.

If you not going to holiday for the entire month of August on a Greek island then the policy at CERN is that you must sweat until you change your mind. Building 40, where the ATLAS and CMS experimental offices center, has a beauty of a glass dome that turns to beast for 30 minutes every day as you are revealed, Indian Jones style, as the site of the lost ark. Fusion powered theatrical lighting is what we are talking about, in your face. And, the architectural trajectory is not a positive one: a new building, 42, adjoining and expanding on the offices of 40 deals with the heat like sawdust deals with vomit, soaking it up and becoming 100 times as gross.

Building 42 wedges itself on a hillside at the perimeter of CERN, gazing off toward incredible views of a horse training field and vineyards. Its brilliance is the wall of southwest facing windows that soak up the 1000 W/m^2 of bone softening heat from the afternoon sun.  This is a good plan in the winter, but the light bulb above your head wilts to a blob of silica and tungsten in the summer. We physicists put our money into high field gradient RF cavities, not air conditioning (at least in these parts). Those shades you see in the photo above operate automatically to prevent the building from technically killing anyone. But, when you are trying not to let your sweat short out your stock Dell keyboard which leaves black spots all over your desk from it’s molten rubber feet, are you really living?

Oh, and look, in the hall is our savior, the water cooler. (A substantial breeze of hot air expanding out into the hallway almost blows you here.) You are going to need at least a few glasses an hour to keep the salts in your blood from crystallizing as the afternoon heats up. But glasses you say? What is that? Such things don’t exist in this part of the world. The spring-loaded cup dispensers on every last one of these gray spigots are fully sprung. The are effectively upside-down water fountains.

Also, don’t even think about getting your own glass from the cafeteria, “IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO REMOVE CROCKERY, GLASSES OR CUTLERIES FROM THE RESTAURANT AREA.” OK, I’ll admit disposable cups are also available, but a 10 minute round trip just to acquire a disposable cup just doesn’t feel right.

Anyway, the heat is tappering off for the moment. Let’s hope the transition to mild autumn weather is a long and lingering one.

I do not know these people. They do not uncover any mysteries of universe, at least not ones that clearly need documenting. But, I can at least report that in this context the glowing green “trees” in front of the reception entrance make a lot more sense.

By the way, this is more people wearing CERN badges than I might see at CERN in a month.

Also, it is more dancing.

Here’s a low content, high pixel post for you…

Do you love tubes and wires? If yes, you have found the correct web page. If no, go stand over there by that concrete block and let me know when you have reconsidered.

A collaboration of particle physics laboratories held a “photowalk” last August (the term is new to me). Groups of photographers received substantial access to CERN, DESY (Germany), Fermilab (USA), KEK (Japan) and TRIUMF (Canada).

The resulting Flickr stream is impressive.

[photo: Connection pipe for LHC magnet by Diego Giol]

A snap-shot from last summer: a graveled roof and some conditioning units don’t take away from the fabulous view of the vineyards this coffee break spot provides.  Of course the view is just as good from R2 and in theory it has more pleasing surroundings, but in the past that option has had issues.

The LHC is running quite nicely these days.  But now I hear it’s “mission accomplished“.

I have a bad feeling about this.

But don’t worry, now this is a mission you too can accomplish at home. it’s time to dust off those double-headed hex keys and reconnect with that one friend of yours who has a truck.  At πkia you can affordably complete your lab furnishings while enjoying the meatballs and lingonberries that CERN’s R1 has mercifully failed to provide.

The HÄDRÖNN CJÖLIDDER is here (leveling feet sold separately).

And don’t forget to go to Reddit and get schooled on Swedish.

“A Chip Is Born: Inside a State-of-the-Art Clean Room” from Wired is just good clean nerd fun: bunny suits, sexy stainless steel vessels, yellow lighting so as to “avoid interference with the UV”.  The cool stuff even includes a cool lack of stuff,

On the right is one of the large silver pumps used to create extreme vacuums inside the machine — as low as 10^-12 atmospheres. (By comparison, the air pressure at 200 kilometers [about 124 miles] above the Earth, where the Space Shuttle orbits, is about a hundred times thicker, at about 10^-10 atmospheres.)

Congratulations to them. But, have you heard that the LHC has 27 freakin’ kilometers of beam pipe at 10^-10 torr, that’s 10^-13 atmospheres, as well as many thousands of cubic meters of insulating vacuum at 10^-6 torr (~10^-9 atmospheres). Their nothing is a trifle of our nothing.

Of course the reason we need such a pure vacuum is because the proton beams will be circulating in this 27 km tube for hours at a time. Even tiny amounts of gas will lead to unwanted collisions. In small amounts this scattering contributes annoying background and in large amounts it could degrade the beam or contribute heat leading to a quench.

Just the process of creating these extreme vacuums can be pretty interesting. At right you can see a TurboMolecular Pump (diagram & combo), clearly bad-ass. Let me wikipedia that for you. You can get only so far with spinny things, though. The final stage of sweeping up troublesome molecules is accomplished by non-evaporable getter, you can call it NEG to impress your friends. It is just a chemical coating. The NEG is activated in a process called “bake-out.” Heaters temporarily raise the temperature of the vacuum vessel to 350 or 220 C.  In bare metal sections the heat releases gas trapped on the surface of the metal.  In other sections the heat actives the NEG and stray gas molecules are trapped.  You can read a little more in an ATLAS e-News from 2008.

People actually read CERN Love, even when we get busy and don’t update for months, hurray!

Caterina e-mailed with two snapshots from deep in CERN’s crevasses, where no signage can be left unmolested. Of the photos (one above, one below) she writes,

The first one dates back from the summer of ICHEP-hysteria. You are working until 4 am, and you finally get out of B40 to go home, thinking that your 3 hours of sleep are just a bike ride away if you can make it home awake. Then you notice this in the printer in the D corridor. At that point, you think you are already asleep and dreaming, or you are having a mental breakdown.

The second one comes from the LHCb pit. Hold me closer, tiny stick figure on a warning sign.

Congrats for the site, I really like it!

(I like the song reference mainly because I’m a sucker for the “Tiny Dancer” scene from Almost Famous. If, in the wee hours of the morning, a control room breaks out in song I hope you hear it here first.)