Right now, they’re letting the proton beam stream farther and farther through the LHC, stopping it at intervals with beam-dumps for safety. Minutes ago, the beam passed half-way around the ring, through the CMS detector (and now beyond CMS). I hear that the CMS trigger rate is showing something…
The inner CMS tracker has been turned off (no high voltage, no read-out) for protection. But the outer muon detectors, farther from the beam and less sensitive to radiation, should be on and taking data. Meanwhile, I’m putting the finishing touches on the software to use these data for alignment.
Happy birthday, Greg!
Update: the beam has gone all the way through! It all happened much quicker than I would have expected. They went step-by-step through each sector, saw a little bit of wiggling in the parts that were new territory, dumped the beam, started again, and apparently that was it.
The Everything Seminar 
September 10, 2008 at 5:39 am |
Hurray! Cool! Actually, I’ve been frustrated trying to view one of the webcasts. As soon as somebody finds a site that’s working, it gets hammered. Sky News is doing amazingly well. And thanks to live updates from the blogosphere.
September 10, 2008 at 6:03 am |
See webcast.cern.ch for a news conference.
September 10, 2008 at 6:06 am |
And the world didn’t end!
September 10, 2008 at 6:12 am |
They had only 2000 slots available in the webcast, but the demand is much less now. The alternative to the webcast was EVO, our videoconferencing system which can get flaky when 20-30 of us try to hold a meeting (particularly on the CERN side). I would have thought that CERN would have contracted the video feed out to a service that knows how to deal with large volume, considering the interest. Sky News is filling that role, but I hadn’t heard of it beforehand.
September 10, 2008 at 6:15 am |
> And the world didn’t end!
From 450 GeV non-colliding beams?
September 10, 2008 at 9:42 am |
Haha, thank you. And its not like people’s arguments for why this will end the world don’t have to be rational.
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