Life as a Physicist

A little bit of fluff. I suspect about half the people who read this blog already know this. I keep forgetting it — though I use the words “core dump” almost everyday (hey - right now I’m working on ATLAS software!).

The term “core dump” relates to an old type of computer memory, in use before the advent of silicon chips, which used grids of tiny magnetized rings to store information. When a computer program in such a system crashed, a record was created about the state of the memory. “Core dump” has come variously to mean any fatal error in a program, as well as slang for getting the long version of a story from someone.

This is from the SLAC today web mailing. The Fermilab version is a bit depressing right now: any day now the layoffs will be announced - and that day is going to be depressing when it finally arrives.

I noticed in a Fermilab Today issue (the May 3rd issue) that Fred Ullrich retired. He ran Visual Media Services forever (well, as long as I can remember). I’ve interacted with him on and off for years. Sometimes begging him to prepare a poster for a conference that I’d waited until the last minute to finish off. I wanted to send him a congrats email. But I can’t find his email address!

So, as usual, I’m going to take this one little anecdote and extrapolate it way beyond reasonable limits (this is a blog, after all). The normal place to look for this sort of thing is the Fermilab white pages - an online directory. But the problem is Fermilab has taken computer and employee security to the level that pretty much the day you leave Fermilab all trace of you ever existing is removed from their databases. I realize this is how all of corporate America (and perhaps the rest of the world) works, but the problem is Fermilab feels like a “home” to me - and so this seems like fairly harsh treatment. Not something you’d do to your friend - especially as they are leaving on good terms. Queue the refrain “Ah, it was better in the old days…”

Bummer. At any rate - Fred - thanks for all your help over the years, and have fun starting the second half of your life!

Visual Media Service has a great collection of pictures taken over the years at Fermilab (ha! the page still says to contact Fred — he isn’t gone yet!!). Well worth looking through!

There are lots of old superstitions - some of them we still live our lives by. Running a large experiment like D0 is no different. For example, there are a set of ducks along the console - the rumor is if they aren’t there then the whole system will cease to operate. I don’t think anyone has been brave enough to remove them…

I pulled the following quote from a recent shift report:

Beam was nice for a while.  Then while talking to Bill Lee about losing the beam, we lost the beam, thereby illustrating Bill’s spooky powers in the control room.

Bill has long been making our control room run smoothly, and should know the lesson: don’t talk about loosing the beam! You’ll jinx it!! [Technical reason: apparently an important power supply went out of allowed operating range].

As anyone who as worked at a US national lab knows, safety is job #1. The constant reminders and cross checks and forms that have to be signed before work can be done can sometimes be a little overbearing. And a bit frustrating - but there is a reason they are there; they seem to work.

Still, I can’t help but cringe when I see one of those posters that shows those cartoon characters “Hey, safe work is happy work!” or some such blather.

Fermilab seems to have come up with a better approach. I think the way this happened was they asked the graduate student association for some safety quotes. These were then turned into posters and have been distributed around the site. They work because they are out of the ordinary, and, for the most part, clever. Heck, I want to read them. I took photos of the ones I saw on my last visit:

• Take accidents to absolute zero.
• Beamline and spine, keep them aligned.
• Superconduct yourself in a safe manner.
• Accidents can happen in a blur! Stay focused.

I’m on shift. At D0 this means we are 4 stories underground, in an all concrete building. One of the shifters looked up and saw a single drop of water fall from the drop-ceiling (think those awful ceilings that every school has).

We called the guy responsible for this sort of thing - even though a single drop of water isn’t much of anything, it seemed like a very odd place: in the middle of a room, many feet from any exterior wall.

After a few minutes of investigation we discovered cracks in the concrete floor and water was dripping through from the large AC unit above (which cools our Level 3 computer farm of 1200 CPUs).

No no one wants to sit over in that corner of the control room.

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!