This labor day weekend, I am setting aside the sacrifices of my ancestors.These brave men and later, women, struggled to free themselves of the oppressive bonds of the industrial elite. The won their rights, they won their dignity, and for that we should be eternally grateful. But, here I am, on shift.
It doesn’t matter anyway – everybody who isn’t a scientist tells me to “get a real job” anyway, so this shouldn’t even count as work. I still get paid, though! HA HA!
Building 620 (see the picture below) is where the BaBar detector is housed. The top of the building sits above ground, but the detector is beneath the ground and can be accessed only from the side of the hill under which it rests. The accelerator, called PEP-II, passes through the BaBar detector. This is also where the electrons and positrons collide, or “interact”, and so it’s called an “Interaction Region”.
We’re currently under very stable operating conditions. The accelerator is “delivering nice luminosity”:http://bbr-onlwww.slac.stanford.edu:8080/babarrc/BaBarStatus.html and we’re hoping to see that luminosity increase in the coming days (though not during the Labor Day weekend). It’s quiet, and there isn’t too much to do when the detector and the accelerator are both behaving themselves.
Except blog. I guess there’s time to do that. Oh, is that an alarm?
