0.32 nanoOhms!

If read the title ala Doc Brown in Back to the Future, you'll have the right idea :)

The latest news from the LHC is very encouraging; the average resistance of the splices in Sector 1-2 is 0.32 nOhms. It's great news because 1) the resistances are within specs for that sector and 2) they are able to measure the resistances that precisely! If you remember from the incident last year, one of these splices with a high resistance (probably around 100 nOhms) caused a massive quench and the release of helium... and our >1 year delay.

So we continue to monitor the cooling progress, especially of Sector 6-7, which will be the last 1/8th of the ring to be "cold":



You can see it still has a way to go before 1.9 K, but it's getting there. Nothing like low resistances to brighten my week :) Let's hope the rest of the sectors follow suit.

A bientôt!

Hawking Education

On Wednesday afternoon, I had the privilege of seeing a lecture by Stephen Hawking on "The Creation of the Universe".

I was up in the cheap seats:



and had to get there almost 90 minutes ahead of time for one of the last seats in the auditorium. But it was worth it :)

I was expecting people to ask questions after, but alas none came. I guess when you're faced with asking him a question:



a little trepidation is normal. I feel like I'm building up a repertoire of stories to bore future generations of students... "I remember when the LHC was just about to start, Stephen Hawking came to give a lecture at CERN..." And the students will think to themselves, ugh, not the Hawking story... at least she isn't going on about Tom Hanks again ;)

A bientôt!

Origin of Mass

One of the hottest topics surrounding the LHC is the Higgs boson. Probably in part because of its catchy name and in part because we give it a great responsibility -- it gives other particles mass.

Along these lines, here is great video highlighting the Higgs that was the winner of the ATLAS/CERN Multimedia Contest:



Nicely done, and a well-deserved winning video.

I'd also like to welcome any Cogito readers! Cogito is a forum for young people who are interested in science to connect with each other and experts. I have been participating in an interview/forum over that way, so head on over and check it out!

A bientôt!

New Countdown

Sorry for the hiatus! It's been a busy, fun summer and I will be sure to update you all on my travels... but for today, I'm back to focusing on the LHC.

For the true groupies, a colleague pointed me to a great website:

http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/

that actually gives a brief status update on each of the sectors, along with a "Latest News" tidbit. It currently says:

• Sector 78 being cooled down for powering

• Sector 45 cool down started

• Sector 12 being filled with liquid He

• Cool-down of sector 6-7 started

This should provide a great source of the newest information on the status of the LHC; they update it about once/week. It's a little jargon-y, but don't forget you have a road map.

Next, ENERGY! I'm sure by now you have heard that the LHC is going to come up at 7 TeV (that would be 7,000,000,000,000 electron Volts; 3.5 TeV per beam) during the 2009-2010 run, about 1/2 the design energy (14 TeV). But no worries, we will anyway need some time to commission ATLAS and CMS, and the LHC operators will get a chance to take this new machine for a real spin at about 1/2 max before ramping up to the maximum possible energy when the machine is ready for it. This might have been a bit of a surprise if you hadn't been paying close attention... but being a little conservative for this run is ok in my book.... and it's still 3.5 times the energy of Fermilab's Tevatron (Booyah! not that it's a competition... ok, maybe a little bit ;) ... but they do have more data than us... for now...). Ok, maybe I feel a bit bad about talking smack to the Tevatron when Fermilab's director is so magnanimous.

And, for the skeptics, perhaps you need a 3 minute reminder what went wrong last year, why the bleeding edge sometimes hurts, and why we're doing this in the first place...





...I got goosebumps at the end. The LHC temperature map is back on my dashboard, and it's time to start a new countdown to collisions.

A bientôt!

Back to School!

For the past week and a half, I attended the 2009 CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. It was very satisfying to be in full-time learning mode for a while... a nice break from coding at my desk all the time :) We had some great speakers -- most of them took their charge very seriously, and you could tell that they put a lot of work and thought into their slides, even if they sometimes couldn't cram in all of the information they wanted to ;)

Here are some of my favorite photos/figures from the lectures (note that these are stolen from the ppt/pdf files at the link below). Hopefully they will give you a taste of the wide range of topics covered, and inspire you to investigate further :)

Visualization of Supersymmetry (Giudice):

We live in the golden region, and would only see the "shadows" from the superspace.

Groove caused by an errant beam in the SPS beam pipe (Wenninger):

The SPS is the ring that accelerates protons up to 450 GeV before they are injected into the LHC.

A healthy busbar, unlike the one that caused the September 19th incident... (Wenninger):

String breaking (Antinori):

The concept of strings is useful for describing pulling apart 2 quarks... eventually it becomes "easier" to pop a new quark-anti-quark pair out of the vacuum than to keep pulling.

Matter glacier (Servant):

Visible matter is the part of the glacier sticking out above the water, dark matter is hidden from view.

The ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker, lit up with a Sept 2008 splash event (Hoecker):

Do you see the Higgs? Ha ha, j/k.

The entire agenda is posted, including video! if you want to learn more.

A bientôt!

Along the Same Lines...

Apparently Jorge and I are on the same page these days:



This is hilarious, but unfortunately physicists' comments would be way more verbose and argumentative...

A bientôt!

Spotted...

Pop quiz: Life at CERN is (a) more exciting or (b) less exciting than an episode of Gossip Girl. Answer: it depends on the day.

Last September, the answer was (a) on a daily basis. Lately, I would have to answer (b). No data, no news from the LHC, and a bunch of Swiss/French holidays in May have made for a quiet month. But in the calm before the storm we are sometimes (often?) no better than gossiping teenagers...

Spotted, little J. snoring during the LAr meeting.

Is B. leaving ATLAS for CMS?

This just in, N. and S., former collaborators, now collabafoes.

Granted, we are a little less obvious than sending text messages. But instead we use blogs, emails, hypernews, and wikis to do our dirty work. If you don't believe me, check out our rumors website!

Spotted, John Oliver riding the magnet outside R1.

That permanent position at X lab/university? Sorry Lonely Boy, we heard it was offered to Chuck.

Not that I'm advocating a TV show be made about physicists at CERN ... it's not that exciting, and besides there's already one out there.

So, while we lie in wait ready to pounce on the first collisions, snarky side arguments and passive-aggressive turf wars are par for the course. I don't particularly enjoy them, but I figure they are kind of like training for the free-for-all that will come when data arrives and everyone starts their bump-hunting. Don't get me wrong, everyone will be thrilled for a good couple days after first collisions. But with any luck, if things go smoothly we will be scrambling to analyze, analyze, analyze ... because the clock is ticking and the timer goes off when the first papers come out. We will be competing against CMS, but we will also be competing with each other to be in that first batch. Getting your Ph.D., a job, or tenure depends on it.

XOXO