We’re taking data like it’s 1999

This has been a whirlwind week for me. Ever since I arrived in Geneva last week, I’ve been keeping myself as busy as a grad student so that I can be a more effective professor. I truly need to understand something of ATLAS before I can lead a group of people in ATLAS. In the spirit of that, I have been learning about shift-taking, physics analysis, and getting a sense about possible service work.

In the span of the last five days, I’ve trained for so-called “Trigger/DAQ”, or TDAQ, shifts. These are the desks in the control room responsible for monitoring the health of data-taking, from the trigger to the pushing of reconstructed events to disk. I will tomorrow “shadow” the Trigger Desk and learn how the trigger desk shifter operates. I’ve been taking training classes, practicing on a simulated trigger monitoring panel, and tomorrow at 06:30 I’ll walk over to Point 1 and become a newbie shifter.

I’ve also been trying to get my brain around physics analysis on a hadron experiment, and specifically inside ATLAS. A colleague of mine took time this past Saturday to walk me through all the stages of analysis, from finding data, to reducing the data and creating new objects (such as Z boson candidates) to plotting the data and thinking about how to learn more about these events. ATLAS now has enough events that people are having a lot of fun (and stepping all over each other’s toes). I wanted to taste some of that excitement, and I’ve been having big highs (made my first plot) and big lows (data processing crashing after 27/3000 events).

Really, I feel like I did in 2000 when I showed up at BaBar. Nobody thinks I know how to do anything (including me), I’m absolutely terrified of pissing off an international collaboration of long-time Atlanteans before I gain their trust, and I’m exhilarated as I start to have ideas about things to look for in the real data.

I missed the first data taking on BaBar in 1999, but this is my 1999. 10 years late, but better than never.