Tonight is very likely my last shift on the BaBar experiment. I just got the baton from the penultimate liaison shifter, my colleague Jose, and here I sit. The usual Liaison console has been commandeered by the staff of the PEP operations crew. There’s a buzz in the room. The BaBar detector has been ramped down into its “injectable” state for what may be close to the last time. The machine has been handed over from stable operations to cutting-edge R-and-D. The PEP crew are testing the limits of the machine, and the excitement is palpable. Experts are on the phone, or sitting in clusters arguing about the behavior of the beams, or waiting for technicians and engineers to respond to calls to remove hardware limits on parts of the machine.
I’m not needed here, of course. No data, no liaison. But I don’t care. I love to be here – I’ve always like Liaison Shifts best, because it puts me in the accelerator control room. Jose took a bunch of pictures of the control room and one of me, so I’ll post that when he sends it to me. Otherwise, I’m going to work on my physics analysis a little while I’m here.
I’ll miss the Main Control Center, or, as a friend of mine once said, “MCC, or M-C-squared, or just ‘E’, for short.”
