The Blackberry goes off at 6, playing a jolly little electric piano tune. In the dark of a room in Hostel 41 – a room I have affectionately taken to calling the “Monolith Apartment” (see Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”) – I dismiss the alarm and swing myself out of bed. Thus begins the second of two days of shadow shift – two glorious days. My breakfast is a multi-grain bar from the vending machine at the end of the hall; the CERN restaurants do not open until 7, the start of the shift, and I have no place to keep food overnight in the Hostel. These are the strange quirks of a laboratory at the center of world particle physics, strangely ill equipped to support world particle physicists.
The walk from the Hostel to Entrance B is in the dark. Lights are on in buildings; in some cases those lights were left on by accident the night before, in some cases those lights are watching over a desperate graduate student who just wants to go home and sleep but knows they can’t (or worse, “shouldn’t”). Winter in Geneva is crisp and a little damp. The morning air wakes you up, and by the time you arrive at the Point 1 control room you’re ready to be out of the cold. Crossing the road in front of Entrance B, your feet crunch on the dry leaves lining the edge of the road, a road that takes you through one electronic gate and past cooling towers to point 1.
Shift has been amazing. The ATLAS control room is laid out just like an ESA or NASA control room, with desks assigned to systems and subsystems and a huge wall of information looking down on all of us. Event displays flash events – tracks, calorimeter hits, muon chamber hits – while a dozen other windows show plots of interest, LHC beam status, run control information, data acquisition system rates. The room is humming with activity – LHC beam changes trigger “red alert” alarms, the shift leader’s phone rings, people are huddled around the run control shifter trying to solve a problem with an application. And in all of this, the data must flow.
After today, I won’t be sitting in the control room for at least a little while. With teaching next semester, my travel is highly constrained. But I won’t forget this, and I want to come back here and do real shifts before the running ends in 2010.
