 | Pajama-clad attendees. Image courtesy of Reidar Hahn, Fermilab. | | |
About 400 scientists, journalists and physics fans—many sporting pajamas—gathered in the Wilson Hall atrium outside the CMS Remote Operations Center (ROC) at Fermilab at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning to witness the startup of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Coffee and cookies may have added some kick, but the palpable adrenaline kept yawns at bay.
“That’s real, they’re really ramping up,” said Brendan Casey, a Fermilab physicist, as the CERN broadcast displayed the first RF (radio frequency) pulse from the LHC.
As the beam advanced into one sector of the accelerator after another, CMS physicists in the ROC monitored their screens intensely, waiting for it to reach the CMS detector. At 2:55 it hit, and within about 15 seconds, the image from the control room in Cessy, France splashed across their screens: virtually all the calorimeter towers lit up with particles – CMS recorded its first event originating from the LHC!
Joel Butler, head of the US-CMS research program, appeared gratified. “This is great. LHC is opening a new energy frontier. It’s something we’ve seen only a few times. And CMS is a fantastic detector, extremely well-conceived.” He praised the NSF and the DOE as pioneers in developing necessary tools for distributed data analysis, citing the VDT as an example. “It will be relatively easy to analyze the mountains of data we’ll get.”
Steve Holmes, associate director for accelerators at Fermilab, echoed Butler’s awe and sense of reminiscence. “This is a changing of the guard. The LHC is now the highest energy accelerator, the first since June of 1983,” he said, referring to Fermilab’s Tevatron. “It's been a long run.”
Young-Kee Kim, Deputy Director of Fermilab, said she is proud of Fermilab’s contributions to the LHC and to the current state of particle physics. With a smile, she quipped “The Higgs race is more real now.”
—Anne Heavey, iSGTW |
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