This is an exciting time for the BaBar experiment. We have just completed our last shutdown between run periods, where we performed a series of maintenance tasks and small upgrades and the accelerator performed a series of engineering upgrades. This three month down-time was the last chance to make major improvements to both accelerator and detector before the final data-taking run of the experiment: Run 7.
This past week the accelerator began operations. I have a modest but exciting role in the operations maintenance of the detector, but the accelerator is a whole other world. The heart of any collider experiment, the electron/positron accelerator we use (PEP-II) is a storage ring capable of hours, if not days, of continuous beam storage and collision. Now that the accelerator is coming back to life, we’ve started having so-called “Liaison” shifts again. This is a BaBar person who sits in the accelerator control center and mediates activities between the two groups. I have the pleasure of sitting Liaison shifts this weekend while Jodi is out of town. It’s been exciting, as we get over all the little bumps that make a startup worth the price of admission.
It’s bittersweet – this is it, the last official run of the experiment. But it’s terribly exciting. There are so many opportunities to do great science with an unparalleled sample of quark matter and leptons. Who knows? Maybe there are even a few unexpected surprises buried in that data somewhere! It makes all the looking worth it.
