Category: CERN

Since there is no beam right now and there is nothing in the ATLAS Trigger system that requires my attention, I can focus instead on this: thanks to CERN, I saved CHF 3.40 this morning. This summer, a friend of mine is hosting me in a spare room in his apartment in St. Genis. Getting from St. Genis to CERN is still not an entirely solved problem; at least, not in the sense that the Swiss have solved the problem of getting to CERN from their side of the border. On the Swiss side, trams and buses run VERY frequently and you usually have at least a couple of options for getting to CERN for an appointment (say, a day shift).

In St. Genis, on the French side of the border, you have the Y bus . . . and that’s pretty much it. Otherwise, you can bike, walk, or drive. I don’t mind walking, but it’s a 40-minute walk from the apartment where I am staying to the front door of CERN.

So what was my dilemma? I have a day shift that begins at 7am. I need to get there a little early to walk to the Esso gas station and get food for breakfast and lunch. Then I need to arrive around 6:45am in the ATLAS Control Room and debrief the last shifter, hopefully letting her escape a bit early in the process. Here are my apparent transportation options:

1) Walk. This is free, burns calories (which is nice!), and takes 40 minutes. To achieve the above goals requires me to start walking around 6am. However, chances are I will arrive at the Esso sweaty and breathless and with blisters. Not a great way to start the day. (I already have blisters from breaking in a new pair of shoes)

2) Bus. The Y bus runs once an hour. Yep, I said it. Once an hour. It arrives at the Lion bus stop in St. Genis, just a 5-minute walk from the apartment, at 06:12 (or so). It costs CHF 3.40. That adds up after a few days.

So I can walk and get sweaty and tired, or pay CHF 3.40 for an infrequent bus.

But is there a THIRD way?

Thanks to my gracious host in St. Genis, I learned that there is a third way: the CERN LHC/SPS shift shuttle. It picks up at Lion at 06:17 – still a bit early for my tastes. But, here is the positive side: it gets me to CERN gate B sweat-free, and it does it at no cost to me. Now that is a business proposition that I can live with!

And, to boot, the driver was super friendly.

So I saved CHF 3.40 today, and boy am I happy. (and dry)

The experts and shifters currently lurking at the Trigger/DAQ desk agree: those beam dump “death spiral” plots that LHC puts up on their status page are COOL.

Today, I am sitting a “shadow shift” at the Online Trigger shifter station. My trainer, the actual shifter, has been outstanding and helped fill in some of the gaps between the online video learning system and the real desk and its duties. There weren’t too many gaps – mostly little things about new tools or the order in which to check things – so it’s been fun. And, we’ve had some great steady data taking all shift. This morning, ATLAS crossed the line and collected over 6 inverse femtobarns of data; that’s 25% more than last year in less than half the time. And there is no end in sight…

Add to that the fact that we are running at 8 TeV, where the production rates for interesting physics processes are all about 20% larger and that means that we actually have in hand the equivalent of 50% more data than in all of 2011 (1.2 x 1.25 x 4.9/fb), thinking in terms of “interesting physics per unit integrated luminosity.”