Life as a Physicist

About a week ago or so the Tevatron developed a vacuum leak. The accelerator can’t run under conditions like that: the protons whizzing around billions and billions of times a second would collide with the air or Helium that had leaked in and would go crashing out of the accelerator. It wouldn’t take long before all the protons and anti-protons were lost and there would be no collisions.

So, there is only one thing to do — shut down and fix it. Unfortunately, because of the leak’s location, they had to warm up a superconducting magnet. A controlled warming (and the required cool-down) take about 4 days. Then you have to fix the leak — so at least a week with no beam.

As a side note - I think the timing was rather interesting. Clearly, the Tevatron was complaining about the budget situation in Washington DC.

At any rate, no one expected beam until tomorrow. This has been great: I’ve not had to do my owl shifts since I got here! But yesterday it started to look like they might make it. In the electronic logbook things like “lets get a store in this year!” started to appear everywhere. As a result, I was on shift from midnight until 8am last night, just in case. And they were busy. And even worse - they were calling all sorts of experts when they had problems - so a lot of people got woken up.

And lo - I just read they did it! That was a lot of work! But it is exactly the right way for an accelerator to end the year: making physics!

Happy New Year!