Ah, shifts. I love them. It’s the stuff that brings you as close to the experiment as a casual particle experimentalist gets these days. If I were a systems expert, I have my hands deep in the warm guts of the detector every day. But I am not, and so this is as close as I can get to the experiment on a casual basis.
I’m in the Main Control Center of the accelerator tonight, on a “swing” shift from 4 pm to midnight. It’s the final three hours of the shift right now, and it’s been quite a ride. Since our start-up a few weeks ago, the Positron Electron Project (PEP) folks have gotten us up to very nice luminosities. The measure of a collider is its *luminosity*, the number of collisions per square-centimeter per second. We’re running at about 5×1033 collisions/cm2/s, which is a great place to be given we have only been running a few weeks. The BaBar experiment is taking data, the accelerator is cranking up the luminosity a few notches each day, and life is good.
As I said, it’s been an active shift. Beams up, beams down. Beams in collision, and beams out of collision (making for showers of radiation that the BaBar detector is a bit sensitive to). Detector up, detector down. But all in all, we’ve made remarkable progress for an experiment that wasn’t operating for eight months! I’m very proud of my colleagues in the accelerator division, and I am proud of the BaBar system experts who keep our machine running 24 hours a day.
Ah, the warm comfort of a running physics experiment!
