5 fb-1 – thanks, Fermilab! September 29, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in D0, Fermilab.add a comment
Fermilab just reached 5 fb-1 of data delivered to the experiments. When things started in March of 2001 I don’t think I ever expected us to get here – but the recent performance of the Tevatron has been stellar! The DZERO experiment has recorded 4.36 fb-1 of data (I expect CDF is close to that). The 13% dead time is due to downtime on our detector’s part – broken bits and normal trigger dead time.
The current results the Tevatron is releasing are all for 3 fb-1 of data – so we have an additional 2/5ths worth of data to improve everything (like our Higgs).
Thanks!!
The Debate September 27, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in politics.add a comment
I managed to catch the debate on the radio. Science got mentioned once – when Obama was talking about improving infrastructure and education. I guess that was a win.
I’ve not looked at the pundit sites yet, but here is what I thought. Ick. I really didn’t like McCain. He reminded me of one of those high school bullies. The things he wanted to do were simplistic – his “Freeze all spending!” is the poster child for this approach. Obama had a much more nuanced position. Both of them, but McCain in particular, seemed to try to distort each others voting record. McCain’s “you voted against our troops” attack was typical – give me a break. It was a random fictional president who said it best: “You can’t run such a great country on four words”. And half the time McCain would ignore the moderator’s request and just say whatever his favorite attack was. I spend my life trying to understand complex subjects – as do many people – and it is very very rare these days there is a “yes” or “no” answer to any of the questions I’m studying. It is the same with running our country. It felt like Obama fully recognized that difference, and McCain was all about yes/no.
McCain clearly won the sound-bite contest, however. I wasn’t very interested in voting for him before this debate, but I’m interested even less so now. Disappointed.
Kill Off The Department of Energy?!? Crazy talk! September 27, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in politics.1 comment so far
Sometime back in 1994 McCain was quoted saying:
"I would certainly favor doing away with the Department of Energy and I think that given the origins of the Department of Education," the Senator said on CNN’s Late Edition in December 1994. "I would favor doing away with it as well."
I do not know what McCain’s current position is on this topic – it is impossible to find something official like this on his web site. After all, it is a fairly controversial topic. Does eliminating the Department of Education pass the Grandma test? I think not.
But these two seem to be favorite punching bags of the conservative right. I think I understand their motivation behind getting rid of the Department of Education. It makes home schooling – and religious schooling – hard by setting up rules and regulations that follow the church-and-state-are-separate and all children must pass tests, etc. I have my doubts about their ability to execute a coherent science program, but there is a lot of infrastructure that must be taken care of to keep our education system going.
The one I don’t get is the Department of Energy. Why does the right not like that? Is it the cold-war era of spending and problems cleaning up nuclear and bomb waste? The DOE is huge, and it does so much. Heck – it is the largest funder of research in the USA (yes, larger than the NSF). In an organization that big there are bound to be some problems – but if you decided to eliminate it you would have to replace most of its functions in other departments. And that would be a huge headache – and wouldn’t save much money. So why do people want to get rid of it?
That Is Just Sad September 24, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC.2 comments
When I searched for “Large Hadron Collider” on google the other day it told me:
I suppose any press is better than no press!
Will There Be LHC Beam This Year? September 23, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in CERN, LHC.7 comments
Well… I wrote this post last night – before the press release that arrived in my email this morning at 10:50am (pacific time) – there will be no beam in the LHC until early spring… I’ll leave the rest of the post below, though I don’t know if it has any value at this point… But I’m too lazy to write a new one!
I’m not privy to inside information (if I was I wouldn’t write this post!). But you can do the following calculation yourself.
The LHC is going to be down for 2 months. That means the machine will be cold and ready to start power up in mid November. The current winter shutdown will probably commence at the end of November. That means only two weeks of time to power the machine up, put beam back in, try collisions (at 900 GeV), sync up the RF system and perhaps try acceleration. 900 GeV, by the way, is the beam injection energy: one doesn’t have to commission the whole acceleration sequence in order to run the LHC at 900 GeV.
Not a lot of time. From the accelerator point of view I’m not sure it makes sense. ATLAS and CMS, as well as others, however, are probably dying for any data they can get their hands on. They have had a taste, but even a week of collisions at 900 GeV would go a long way to helping with the commissioning. That isn’t to say that both experiments won’t have plenty to do during the winter shutdown even if the collisions don’t occur. I believe both will want to open up their detectors and get inside to the parts that are not easily accessible, for example.
Finally, there is politics. Closing out the year without collisions will be “a tough beat”. The newspapers are watching everything we do and they will surely report on this as a disappointment. Scientifically (given the information I have – which is the same that everyone else has and is undoubtedly not complete), it seems like the case for beam this year is on thin ice.
This whole post is based on the premise that the problem that occurred is as the LHC accelerator division expects: something that will take one or two days to fix. If a magnet needs to be swapped out with a spare or something similar to that, then I’d guess we will almost certainly not have beam. We should have the answer to that question as soon as they have a look inside the magnet, which will occur when it is warm in a little less than a month. As CERN has said:
“It’s too early to say whether we’ll still be having collisions this year,” said James Gillies, chief of communications for CERN, in an e-mail message.
The winter shutdown is due to the very high electricity costs in Geneva. I’m used to electricity use spiking in the summer as everyone turns on their A/C. Anyone know what causes the high cost in Geneva during the winter?
Every Move You Make… September 23, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC, press.add a comment
Here is a bit of news that showed up on CNET:
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the organization that built the LHC, announced Thursday that a transformer that helps cool part of the collider had malfunctioned, forcing operations to be suspended.
Think about that for a minute. CNET – a tech web publication – is following the ups and downs of the LHC. Have we ever had that level of interest in a HEP experiment before!? Not that I’m aware of. I remember the Fermilab start-up and even then no one tracked it like this.
One thing about the article:
No word on why it took CERN so long to let us know about the malfunction, though.
I don’t know for sure, but I can guess: they aren’t used to this level of press interest. So telling the press exactly what is going on with the machine gets done after everything else is taken care of (how to fix, implement the plan, etc.).
I wonder if they will have the latest magnet quench web page? We should write a desktop widget which has LHC status. 
Keeping Perspective September 22, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in USA, politics, science.3 comments
The bailout proposed by the US government to keep our financial system afloat is going to be about $700 billion (US). I’m guessing that is going to rise to about $1 trillion or so by the time all is said and done. I can’t really fault the government on this – now that we are here something like this has to be done. It looks bad to even myself and I’m sure if I knew more about economics I’d be even more scared for the US financial system.
The LHC cost about $7 billion. So, you could build 100 of those for the price of this bailout. But it doesn’t stop there – this is going to be a hang-over the US budget will be paying off for years to come. Guess what is going to get hit… you got it. I’m sure funding for science in general is going to be down in the future. Ugh. Not only is that 100 LHC’s worth of science (all types of science!!) we could have done, but it will mean less science in the future as well.
How stupid is that!? I don’t know who to get pissed off at either – this seems to be a problem of group think. Like the echo chamber of the blogosphere.
LHC is Turning on FAST September 19, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Fermilab, LHC.10 comments
During Frank’s talk he said that he was a bit "depressed that it took 25 years to build machine, but just a few weeks to commission" – implying it wasn’t enough of a challenge.
I am, frankly, amazed at how fast this thing has turned on. None of my previous experience had prepared me for how fast they have turned on. The engineering job is incredible. Here they turned on 10 September and they are talking about first collisions (at 900 GeV — really small compared to the planned 14 TeV final operation) this coming weekend!
Given the number of moving parts, electronics, etc., in this machine… well, this is a breath-taking to have gotten this far. As a long-time member of the US community I’m also feeling a bit embarrassed. Our last start up – Fermilab Run 2 – was not nearly as smooth. One key difference between the LHC and Fermilab’s startup, btw, is that all the bits are present in the accelerator from the get-go. Fermilab has continuously been adding bits to the accelerator to improve it (many bits were delayed due to the funding profile).
If we in the USA get a chance to build another accelerator we are going to have to make sure we step up and match (or come close to matching) CERN’s accelerator division!
UPDATE: Yeah Yeah. I know. 2 months of downtime now. What can I say? The accident was probably caused by me posting this. I don’t know if you saw the CERN press release – but note how it said that in a non-super conducting machine this fix would take a few days? The 2 months is because they have to warm the machine up and then cool it down again. What is a magnet replacement at Fermilab? 8 days? I wonder what the difference is in the cryo systems?
The First Day – LHC Perspective September 18, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC.2 comments
Frank Zimmermann gave a talk on the LHC and its status in a SLAC seminar. Some amazing pictures. I recommend taking a look at that PDF.
Some comments that I heard made that weren’t written in the slides:
- If the initial magnet commissioning rate had continued, the LHC wouldn’t have been ready until 2100!
- Ramping up the LHC’s magnets requires a huge amount of energy. Of course, once they are ramped up they store a lot of energy in the magnetic field. When they ramp them down it has to go somewhere — so they put it back into the electrical grid! Just like a Pryus!
- The quench resisters have to dissipate so much power in milliseconds they are basically in large vats of water for cooling.
- When a single magnet quenches all the magnets in that sector are powered down.
- The quench from one magnet can propagate to adjacent magnets because of helium heating. The first magnet heats the liquid helium, which then flows to the next magnet. However, the fact that they power down all the magnets in a sector prevents a chain reaction from occurring.
- Check out the size of the diode! And that thing is built to be able to absorb the current for only 100-200 seconds! Wow!
- His 10 December is really 10 September (misprint).
- He swears that no practice run before the 10th of September other than the public injection into about 20% of the machine during previous tests. Wow.
The picture above is the same beam, appearing twice. Which means it has gone all the way around the ring. And on the first day. I heard a rumor that the folks in the control room were thinking they would have to make it harder so the press remained interested.
Congrats to everyone who is working on getting the machine up and going!
UPDATE: Fixed up the link to the slides. Sorry about that!
Is there an upside? September 17, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in university.1 comment so far
I’ve been watching, with morbid fascination, this slow-motion meltdown of our financial system. My direct exposure is limited, which allows me to be philosophical about the whole thing. Many others are not so fortunate, obviously. I wonder if I will be singing the same tune next year, however?
I’m sure most people have heard that the number of students entering science, math, engineering, and computer science is down. During the .com boom we saw this. When the .com boom crashed, however, we saw an increase in the number of students interested in our science and releated programs. Reading about the candidates positions on science got me to thinking about this.
Now I realize that the fields of finance and physics and science aren’t all that closely related. But they are closer than one might realize – a lot of math and computing is done in the finance sector. People are basically economic animals – they will maximize their chances for success. So if finance isn’t so rich, they will look other places.
My advisor once told me “you aren’t in this for the money!”. I’ve used that same line with my students as well. I’ll never be hungry or worry about where my next meal comes from, but I’m not going to be making a huge sum of money either. But not all of physics (and computer science, engineering, etc.) is academic – industry needs lots of people like that for research as well as operations. So I think an increase is possible.
There is one (at least) flaw in this argument. The economy is slowing and one of the first thing that companies cut is research. After all, when you are in survival mode you worry about breathing, not about getting food 6 months from now!
I will watch student enrollment trends over the next 5 years with interest.
