Via Twitter, CERN reports:

A new record. Both beams in LHC reach 1.18 TeV at 00:42 on 30 November.

That makes the Large Hadron Collider the highest-energy accelerator in the world! It will be the world’s highest energy collider once it brings the beams together at that energy. I’m not quite sure when that will be — the LHC team is making such fast progress that it’s hard for the experiments even to keep up with what their plans are — but I bet it will be soon enough.

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Admittedly, it is a little harder to follow all the LHC excitement if you are here in the US rather than at CERN.  The announcement of first collisions on Monday came while I was teaching my class, and I’ve been trying to piece together the whole story by talking to our people over there and reading the slides from various meetings.  Of note was a public meeting at CERN yesterday (yes, Thanksgiving Day, another impediment if you are in the US) with presentations from Steve Meyers, CERN’s director for accelerators, and the four LHC experiments.  See the slides and video here.  As everyone else has been saying, the past week has been a thrill (or at least a vicarious one!) for the LHC, the four experiments on the ring, and really all of HEP.  Check out Meyers’s slides in particular, where he documents just how far we have come in the past fourteen months.  The experiments have turned around information from these first few collisions very quickly; some detectors are already able to reconstruct decays of the neutral pion, for instance.  We have huge expectations for the next set of collisions and then for the increases in collision energy that will follow.

My particular contribution to CMS has been in computing, and I’m happy to say that all of that has gone quite smoothly so far.  The prompt reconstruction of events went off without a hitch, and data was flowing very quickly out of CERN to the Tier-1 and Tier-2 sites.  We soon lost track of how many sites had copies of the collision data, and now we’re seeing plenty of people use the distributed computing system to analyze it.  When the next round of collisions comes, we’ll be ready to do it all again.

So while it’s hard to follow the news up to the minute, I’m still connected to the start of a great particle physics adventure.  I’m trying to drag the rest of Nebraska along with me — we managed to get a release placed in the local paper, and if you read this post soon enough, you can hear me at 8:30 AM Central time on Saturday 11/28 on KZUM, Lincoln’s community radio station.  I’ve already taped the interview; let’s hope I didn’t sound incoherent!  (At least when I type the blog posts, there is a backspace key….).

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Yesterday I was tidying up my office and I found something cute on my chalkboard:

Do you see it? Amidst the remnants of a discussion with one of my colleagues, it appears that I now have a Feynman diagram of a Thanksgiving turkey:

Actually, I’m not sure if it’s a turkey, but it’s certainly some kind of poultry. The diagram was drawn by another theory grad student, Yuhsin Tsai. The irony is that we were discussing whether this process should be considered to be a penguin diagram. There are also diagrams called seagull diagrams. I guess physicists have a thing for birds in their diagrams. (By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve found funny-looking diagrams.)

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to write up a few posts explaining how Feynman diagrams work. In the meanwhile, happy Thanksgiving everyone!

-Flip

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This Thanksgiving particle physicists have a lot to be thankful for, not the least of which have been the exciting progress with collisions at the LHC.

Happy ATLAS Scientists, Image from the ATLAS press release.

While images of happy LHC-ers made a big splash in the media, somewhat understated in the news was President Obama’s reaffirmation of his commitment to science and science education through the a new “Educate to Innovate” campaign whose goal is to make American science and mathematics education second to none. Here’s the video of the announcement (and the transcript):

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

If I may interject some personal opinion, a concerted effort to elevate “STEM” (“science, technology, engineering, and math”) education in the US is as important (if not more so) to the sustained well-being of American science as the LHC. The president also made the key point that this is important not just for the sake of science itself, but also for the country as a whole:

The key to meeting these challenges — to improving our health and well-being, to harnessing clean energy, to protecting our security, and succeeding in the global economy — will be reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation.  And that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in those fields that hold the promise of producing future innovations and innovators.  And that’s why education in math and science is so important.

The Educate to Innovate Campaign draws from the private and public sectors to find ways to promote science to kids. As someone who grew up watching Bill Nye the Science Guy, I was very pleased to see that many of these plans involve tying in science programming on television shows. Further, it was good to hear the president reaffirm the goal that we need to transform the culture of education in this country. He remarked that during his recent trip to Asia, he was impressed by the “hunger for knowledge” and “insistence on excellence” that formed the foundation of each students’ education.

Speaking of Asia, I would be remiss if I didn’t share another understated physics news item from this past week: the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) is in danger of funding cuts from the newly elected Japanese government. For those that are not familiar, the IPMU was recently established to be a high-profile international center for research on the interface of physics and mathematics. It has great potential to act as a focus for theoretical physics in Japan that can connect physicists and mathematicians from all over the world. As reported by Sean at Cosmic Variance, funding cuts are looming ominously for IPMU and the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science is looking for input from scientists around the world. More information is available in an IPMU press release.

Earlier this year the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom provided a renewed funding grant to the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) at Durham University, where I was fortunate to have been able to spend a year as a student. Hopefully IPMU will also be able to continue onwards even during tight economic times.

I know this is the US LHC blog, but the fact of the matter is that particle physics is very much an international effort. CERN itself was, in some sense, a precursor to the European Union and today scientists from around the world contribute to the forefront of particle physics research. Researchers at American universities hail from all over the world and academia flourishes in this environment of diverse backgrounds. And you know what? That’s part of what makes this line of work so much fun. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

-Flip

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With all the encouragement I give others to learn French before they, you know, move to France, I’ve forgotten to mention that you’ll often encounter appliances with German on them. I don’t know what they’re doing here in France, maybe they’re cheap.

All I know is, we just set the dishwasher to “Universal Plus” and let it do its thing.  I’ll have to see if WordReference can tell me what KALT VORSPÜLEN is…

–Mike

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A picture is worth 1000 words

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Candidate Collision Event at CMS

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/cms-e-commentary09.htm

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/pictures221109/CollisionEvent.png

It looks like we recorded a very good collision candidate event!! Enjoy!!

Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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This week has been particularly exciting for those at CERN and the collaborators. We’re back to circulating beams – which was where we left off last September. I anxiously await news about collisions and soon ramping up the energy. My browser has about 10 tabs open looking at views of the ATLAS control room, the beam info, the event display, twitter … it’s exciting times, and hard to think about other work.

But this has given me some time to reflect on the past year. I arrived at CERN just after the first beam circulation. The golden week or so between the LHC working and not. There was so much excitement at CERN, scientists are just like big kids (myself included). Beams were circulating – everything was going so well. No one was really prepared for what happened. I can only imagine how things are this year. From my friends who are there, I feel cautious optimism.

After all the roller coaster that was 2008 and most of 2009, I’m back refreshing webpages every 2 seconds, but not as doe-eyed as before. Things never go as well as you hope, especially not cutting-edge machines. They’re in the process of deciding which energy to start colliding particles - the first step. We’ll soon surpass the accomplishments of last September and hopefully start a new era in particle physics and I wait with cautious optimism.

-Regina

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It has been a very exciting weekend with proton beams in the LHC day and night, but it was still only the warmup.  Now we are eagerly awaiting the first collisions.  Then we will really have begun the LHC era.

But we are not just sitting and waiting for collisions.  I have spent most of the weekend looking at the data collected so far, and based on the email traffic so have many others.  My conclusion is that the ATLAS detector is performing extremely well.

Besides the quality, what has impressed me is how quickly the data has been made available around the world, and how well all the software to analyze it has worked.  This is not a big surprise to me since these are some of the things we have used the last year to improve, but it is nice to see it all work so well.

Just in case you haven’t seen them, teams have been scanning the data and making event displays.

Now that the LHC and the detectors have done everything that was done last year (and more), we can finally move on to what we have really been waiting for, collisions!

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Beam splash event. CMS detector side view

It looks like tonight CMS will be the chosen experiment to press the red button.  The LHC operators have told us that after they perform several tests with the captured beam 1, they will try to run for 20 min with an untouched captured beam 1 (probably meaning they won’t perform any tests) and then CMS will be asked to push the button to dump it!!!!  As I understand, this is a test of this safety feature that each of the experiments has.  After this, they will re-inject.

In all these exciting years of being an experimental particle physicist, whenever I talk about what I do, and in particular when I mention that I have worked in two of the biggest accelerators in the world, people tend to ask me about pushing the “red button”.    I think no one is exactly sure what they mean when they ask, – oh, so you have to push the red button? -, but it always amuses me and triggers my imagination.  I am pretty sure different people imagine different tasks for this big round red thing (the CMS beam abort button, however, is actually pretty small and green.  At least this is what I have heard…)

When I was working in the D0 experiment at the Fermilab’s Tevatron in Chicago, I was aware of many red buttons, but none of them fit my “ideal” red one.  As a data acquisition shifter (the operator who basically runs the data taking), I had to press many, but I don’t remember any being red (or round for that matter) and all of them were within computer graphical interfaces.

As a graduate student, however, a fellow senior graduate student inherited me a RED squared button for my desktop’s keyboard at work when he graduated.  There were many times when I wished the button had a real effect on things (it was a dummy )….. I sometimes pushed it nevertheless.   This button, which read “PANIC” in its legend, had been passed over  for generations ….. I proudly continued the tradition when I graduated.

CMS is running fine, triggering on circulating beams.

Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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There’s a decent amount of publicity out there about last night at CERN.

From the New York Times, Proton Beams Are on Track at Collider:

About 10 p.m. outside Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment…

If all goes well, CERN says, the protons will start colliding at low energies in about a week…

CERN is hoping to achieve that landmark as a symbolic Christmas present before a short holiday shutdown.

I’m looking forward to that – I’ll be on shift to watch CMS several times in the coming weeks.  (As for Christmas gifts, I still also hope to get a fancy rice cooker.)

–Mike

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Beam splash event from Beam 2 (beam onto collimator), CMS detector

Beam 1 circulated for several minutes and before that we were able to take a a few splash events.  Then after they managed to circulate Beam 2 and they are ready to capture it…

The BBC was here for most of the Beam 2 episode.

-Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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The first beam of 2009 has passed through ATLAS! Follow the events at http://twitter.com/cern.

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I am the secondary on-call expert for the High Level Trigger system, therefore I am backing up the primary expert at P5.

Everyone is so excited around here.  We are waiting for the beams to reach P5.  They will eventually circulate around the LHC ring and that will allow their alignment, etc.  The monitor that shows the beam status from the LHC machine reads “Injection Probe Beam”.

It is a great feeling to be here, to make history, to contribute a little bit to the improvement of our knowledge, to the improvement of our own humanity.

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/cms-e-commentary09.htm (I am the guy typing standing in one of the pics )

Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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CERN November 20, 2009

As you can see in the picture I took this morning, it is foggy here at CERN today as we await the first circulating beam of protons in the LHC since last year.  When this will happen exactly is a little foggy as well.  There will probably be protons put into the LHC sometime this evening, so perhaps overnight we will have a circulating beam.

At the ATLAS detector, we are excited for the first beam to ATLAS this year, which will happen first (the way the LHC is configured, the beam has to go almost all the way around the LHC’s ring from where it is injected to get to the ATLAS detector).

The beam will first be made to stop before ATLAS by moving the beam collimator in its way.  This will cause a huge cascade of particles to hit the ATLAS detector (similar to what was done recently at the CMS detector ), and it will be quite useful for us at ATLAS to detect all these particles and check our timing.

After that the collimator is removed and beam will pass through the ATLAS detector, at which point is has just about made one revolution around the LHC.  This will be repeated for the beam going in the other direction around the LHC.  Then in the coming days or weeks we will have two beams of protons in the LHC at the same time…and finally collisions!

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