LHC is ramping up!!!

There was a great email circulated today about the most recent fill done at the LHC. (A fill is an occurance when they stuff the accelerator full of protons and start circulating them around at near the speed of light to cause them to collide at the detectors)

The short and sweet of it is the technicians and scientists that are in charge of revving up the accelerator are starting to understand their machine better and better which means they can squeeze and pack in more protons, which means more intense beams, which means MORE DATA PER FILL!!!

Now they aren't near there design specifications...but this last fill makes a major stride toward achieving that goal!

----- Original Message -----
From: Rolf Heuer

Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 9:39 AM

Subject: A game-changing fill for the LHC - Une exploitation qui change la donne
pour le LHC

A game-changing fill for the LHC

A long period of machine development paid dividends last night with a game-changing fill in the LHC. As I write this, the fill, which started colliding at 19:00 yesterday evening, has just wound down. Both ATLAS and CMS have posted integrated luminosities of over 680 inverse nanobarns, and the initial luminosity for the fill doubles the previous record at 2´1031cm-2s-1.

But it’s not the records that are important this time – it’s normal that in the
start-up phase of a new machine, records will fall like autumn leaves – what’s
significant here is that the LHC’s performance this fill significantly exceeded some crucial design parameters, opening up the path to much better still to come.

Last night’s fill was the first with 56 bunches arranged in trains of eight bunches
per train. The significance of bunch train running is that we can configure the
orbits such that more bunches collide in the experiments, so even though the number of bunches may not be much higher, the collision rate is. For example, last night’s 56-bunch fill had 47 bunches colliding at ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, with 16 colliding in ALICE, whose needs are lower. This compares to a maximum of 36 colliding bunches out of 48 total before we introduced bunch trains.

A big jump in luminosity was clearly expected in moving to bunch trains and
colliding more bunches. What came as a pleasant surprise is that it was accompanied by an exceptional beam lifetime of 40 hours, and less disruption to the beams caused by packing more protons into a smaller space (in technical terms, the beam-beam tune shift was much less destructive to the beams than anticipated). This result means that the LHC operators have more leeway in operational parameters in the quest for higher luminosity.

The plan for today and the weekend is to run for one more fill with 56 bunches in
trains of eight before moving on to 104 bunches in 13 trains of eight, with 93
bunches colliding in ATLAS and CMS. Ultimately, the LHC will run with 2808 bunches in each beam, so there’s still a long way to go. We’ll get there slowly but surely by adding bunches to each train until the trains meet in a single machine-filling train. That will take time, but for the moment, last night’s fill puts us well on the way to achieving the main objective for 2010: a luminosity of 1032cm-2s-1.

Rolf Heuer

Urban Assault Chicago 2010

Last weekend my wife and I competed for the third time in the New Belgium Brewery Urban Assault Bike Race. Did I mention we wore banana outfits!
It was a super fun race once again and really well organized.








I've got the map of the ride shown here:


View Urban Assault 2010 in a larger map
My only complaint I have about the whole race was the second mystery clue which read as follows:

GiRL

smILeS

NeEDEd 

It was clearly an anagram which was meant to tell you to find the next check point. However, in the heat of the race and the pseudo-colors which turns out didn't mean anything we never did decode it. So we missed out on finding the final check point...but even with that we ended up pretty good in the race times finishing 52nd in the Co-ed division (out of 102) and 127th overall (out of 170) These numbers are a little skewed since our time was really fast but we end up lower because we didn't find one of those beads!

After the race we hung out, Heather drank beer (me not drinking gives her extra tokens), got all the free cliff bars I could handle, and got to compete in their fun side games.

One such game was for only the bearded/mustache men and was to entice the crowd for applause by demonstrating our dancing skills.

Now as any of my friends/relatives/acquaintances/near by observers will tell you I suck at dancing! But something about a 2 hour bike race + banana costume make me forget this fact and I just went after it.

Now my skills didn't impress too many, but the banana costume must have and I won a gift certificate for the effort and Heather's adoration for being such a big buffoon.

All in all, a great race on a beautiful day put on by a wonderful company done with the most wonderful bike partner I could even want, my wife!

To give credit these photos are online from the photographer at the race Harlerz Photography.

p.s. The solution to the anagram was Dillenger and you were suppose to go the Biograph Theater at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue (which was ridiculously close to the start of the race...we could've won this for sure), but a good time was still had by all.

The Tevatron and Run III

Tevatron Accelerator

This is a re-post from my other blog: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/author/jonathan/

There has been a great discussion raging at Fermilab surrounding the recent report given by the Physics Advisory Committee on August 31st. In this report the committee considered the impact of extending the life of the Tevatron through 2014 in what is being called around the lab Run III.

Basically what has been outlined is trying to answer the difficult question of whether or not the immediate physics payout of extending the life of the experiments and most likely doubling the data sets out weighs the potential impact on the future experiments at Fermilab. In addition, the performance of the experiments (CDF & D0) in terms of hardware, man power, and analysis reach have to be considered when viewed in light of the draw for many scientists to move onto other interesting experiments happening at Fermilab (NuMI, Project X, etc…) and elsewhere (CMS, ATLAS, and the like…)

What faces the lab, the director of Fermilab (Pier Oddone), and the scientists that work in the world of particle physics is a really difficult one. What they have to do is look into their crystal balls and ask the questions:

1) With the LHC going into a 15 month shutdown at the end of 2011, what will the data the is already on tape look like and what kind of physics reach will it provide us?

2) With the ever improving performance of the Tevatron and the experiments at Fermilab what is the likelihood of having a discovery with a larger data set (read: Find the Higgs or exclude the Standard Model flavor in the low mass ranges)

3) What does the funding question look like for the other interests of the lab in light of the extended running of the Tevatron? Not to mention the timeline / manpower / and resource availability!

These are just some of the big issues….there are clearly 100’s more that me as a lowly graduate student am probably not even aware of! But from my own perspective I see the PAC report as a great sign! Their conclusion was simple:

The Committee strongly endorses the extension of the Tevatron run for three years during 2011–2014 under either funding scenario presented in the charge. The Committee is aware that the development of the future programs might be severely affected and projects delayed by the Collider run. The Committee recommends that efforts be made to mitigate the effects. While the Tevatron run extension would take advantage of a compelling opportunity, the long-term plans of the Laboratory and of the field, as outlined by the P5 report, should be pursued vigorously.

I was really excited to hear this! As a young researcher on the verge of graduating I saw this recommendation as an opportunity to continue my with a post-doc at Fermilab working at a time in particle physics where the chance of a real discovery (Higgs/SUSY/Beyond Standard Model) is a real possibility and to be able to contribute to the American thrust of physics in the global arena during the shutdown/upgrade of the LHC.

There is no question what the future of high energy physics will be, and that is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for many years. There is also no denying that Fermilab is looking to the future with the intensity frontier in such experiments like NuMI and Project X. However, we are at a time where the physics possibilities are so great, the timing too perfect, and the reach of our experiments so close, that I think it would be a shame not to extend the run and take this chance to make a major discovery!

Higgs Exclusion that could be extended (or discovery made) in the low mass region still to be explored

I encourage everyone to read the PAC Report and get excited for the potential reach of the Tevatron! Coming back out of our summer shutdown we are already colliding with inital luminosities near 250 nb-1 and delivering 5000 nb-1 per store. There are so many exciting hints and clues in the analysis in the pipeline at CDF that adding more of this quickly accumulating data will help shed light on all the great mysteries.

Recent result from D0 showing hints of new physics to still be understood in the asymmetry of matter and anti-matter

So, when asked: “To run or not to run?” The answer is TO RUN! At least in this humble blogger’s opinion