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!