NoteMe

Tonight (26th of June) I am going to try something new. One of my friends from MIT is working night shift at his lab at CERN here in Geneva. Since it has been a while since I have been at CERN, and I know that Håkon Wium Lie worked there, and some bird told me that David Storey also once worked there, I'll try to live blog from my friends night shift. Since CERN is really big, and the work done there is very diverse, I can't really generalize and say that this is how they work at CERN. I know this night will be very different from any day (night?!?) I worked at CERN, since he is a physicist, and I am a computer programmer. But at least if anyone would be interested, you will get to see from the inside how it can be for a PhD student in physics at CERN

Update 00:32
So I am getting installed here at in the lab, and they probably gave me the only windows machine in the whole control room. I do lack some tools for image editing and such, and I won't even dare trying to install anything here, so I'll try to live with what I got, and make the best out of it. I need some time find my way around here in the lab, but will try to update the blog post every whole hour from now on, until the night shift is over 08:00 tomorrow morning.


Update 01:43
I can see I missed the 1am mark really really bad. But I have been showed around, and got some nice photos I will share later on when I have managed to edit them in ehhh paint. But to take it all from the start. CERN is the biggest physics laboratory in the world. The biggest accelerator is 27km long which is more than enough to impress me. I am now located at the Meyrin site (Fig. 1), in building 186 (Fig. 2). There is about 600+ buildings at this site, whit 2 restaurants, cinema/auditoriums, library, fire department, doctors and what not. But today the CMS experiment is where to be. CMS is one of the detectors for the upcoming LHC accelerator, and at the moment they are running test runs right behind me here. More on that in not too long.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2


Update 02:07
Time to get to know those I am here with better. First we have my friend Pieter.

Name: Pieter Everaerts
Age: 23
Occupation: PhD Student MIT
Photo


Name: Milan Nikolic
Age:
Occupation: Undergraduate at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), soon to be grad student at UC Davis.
Photo

So next we need to find out what these people do around here except talking in "code" and look at screens with numbers and dots.


Update 03:33
So after sitting here for a few hours trying not to disturb the two workers, I had to start asking questions.

Me:So Pieter, what are you really doing here?
Pieter:Nothing really. We are just checking that the high voltage...blah blaah blah..'
Me:w00t?
Pieter:We are the security for the security. The security is only good as long as it works, right? So if it breaks we step in.
MilanIf one of those machine there [pointing in the corner], we are running this thing blind. In theory this should work, but it is not a really good way to run a 150 million USD worth of machinery. And thats probably just for the material. Just look at us, and all others that made this happen. Thats quite a lot of money just worth of labor.
Me:So this is a detector, or a tracker. Is there a possibility that we will find something tonight that no one else has ever seen before?
Milan:Yes...
Pieter:No...
Milan:Well, there probably happens things around us all the time that has never been seen before. But with the current setup, we would only detect something hit us [the tracker], but we can't measure the momentum of what is hitting us. So we wouldn't know if it was a new super charged particle if it was one.
Pieter:At the moment, it is only Muons we do detect. When the tracker later on is installed into the rest of CMS, we hopefully [crossing fingers] will find heavier particles.
Me:So where does these Muons come from?
Pieter & Milan:*looking at each other*
Milan:Good question. We just put these parts together, we never thought about that. No, just kidding. Protons from "outer space" hits something in our outher atmosphere, and decays into Pions, which is not very stable, and then decays into Muons.
Me:But your tracker is sitting sideways. Is there a hole on the top that will let them in?
Pieter:No they will go through the detector, and we will detect them right away when they get inside.
Me:w00t?
Pieter:Yeah, they even fly through your body as we speak.
Me:No way, I want a level 4 suit, now...


I need a big break now. But first just a small disclaimer. This was mostly written from memory after a long talk with them, and them showing and drawing and scribbling Greek letters all over the place, so if some of the information is a bit inaccurate, or the wrong term is used somewhere. It was probably me remembering wrong, and not their fault. But it should be what they said, with all the physics terms swept out of there.


Update 04:56
OK, so since it has already been way too much talk, maybe some photos are about time. Random selection from tonights event so far.



















I can really feel that I have been up too many hours now. My head isn't working as it did earlier today. But I am hanging in there. And there is more to come.

Update 05:17


Update 06:31
So it is time for what I have waited for all night. A closer look at the tracker. Well, we can't really get too close of it, for understandable reasons. But at least closer than I have ever been before. Finally I can move past the warning signs:











After this last warning message we had to be careful and put the foot cover on and not stomp on the floor with it, and not stomp on the blue mat without the cover. Tricky, but you get used to it. The white clothes are just as fashionable as they have always been. Maybe not the cleanest set of white clothes, but they keep the worst amount of dust away Pieter says, and we move on.

Update 07:31:
So we where about to cross the blue mat. But first we needed those white coats.




The first thing we notice after crossing the blue mat, is that the cooling system is a bit leak, but it won't pose any immediate problems for us.


Outside the tracker there is lots and lots of measuring instruments.


And under here the tracker lies. Lets see if we can get some better shots of it. Inside, we won't have the possibility to go.



Update 07:39
What we see next words can't explain. There is so many machines here, and so many wires, flashing lights and what not. Pictures are better at describing it.










Update 07:55
So thats really it. Pieter Everaearts is kind enough to show me some of the parts that are not assembled yet. This is one of the plates that will go into the tracker. This one as all the others have 6 times 125 channels. That makes about 10 million channels all together when it is done. There should then be about 200 square meters of those silicon plates in the end.


Pieter also have his own rack of these plates he will install somewhere in the tracker. But they need 40 some meters of cable first, so they can't just put in anywhere.


An other one of those beep beep machines.


Pieter show me how they install the racks of those silicon plates.


And what do you know. I finished off the night shift. And we didn't have and problems at all. This job is piece of cake. And I had fun at the same time too. I hope my friends here will keep up the good work when LHC is up and running. And CMS is properly installed to detect what ever they find. I guess they would mind finding the Higgs boson thats for sure. But only time will show who will win this "race".