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Dear Friends
In this edition of the CMS Times the magnet takes centre-stage, having been recently ramped up to its operating field of 3.8 Tesla. Along with results from the first beams, the tests establish CMS as a fully operational experiment. Read more in Point 5 News and our feature article "3.8 Tesla fest".
In the tradition of CERN "fests" as phases start and finish, the Worldwide LHC Grid also had its official start-up on 3rd October and celebrated with an event that featured guests and video link-ups from all over the globe. The event was a chance to showcase CMS computing and the possibilities enabled by the Grid; read about these in our second feature article.
Finally, in the People section you can read about the contributions of members of the University of California at Santa Barbara to CMS. If you have a young scientist working at CERN and would like to highlight your group's work, please let us know and your group could be featured next!
With kind regards
Elizabeth Gibney
Marzena Lapka
Bob Cousins
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October
- CRAFT - Cosmic run at four tesla
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Updated information should be sent to
cmstimes@cern.ch |
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The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in CMS
Some UCSB CMS group members. From left to right: M.Rydenfeldt, M.D'Alfonso, R.Rossin, J-R Vlimant, J.Incandela, J.Ribnik, Y.Shah, S-A Koay and S.Lowette. Steven Kreyer is the only UCSB person resident at CERN who could not be in the picture. (Courtesy: Clotilde Vlimant) |
The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) CMS group includes faculty members Claudio Campagnari, Joe Incandela, Jeff Richman, David Stuart and Mike Witherell. Post-doctoral researchers Tom Danielson, Dmytro Kovalskyi, Slava Krutelyov, Steven Lowette, Victor Pavlunin, Roberto Rossin and Jean-Roch Vlimant bring extensive experience from other experiments including CDF and D0 at the Tevatron. Students in the group include Maria D'Alfonso, Ford Garberson, Chris Justus, Puneeth Kalavase, Sue Ann Koay, Jim Lamb, Finn Rebassoo, Jacob Ribnik, and Wing To. The UCSB technical team is led by engineer Dean White and includes engineers Susanne Kyre, Scott Swain, and technician Steve Kreyer. The group also has two computing professionals; Mattias Rydenfeldt and Yousaf Shah.
UCSB has played significant roles in silicon strip detector projects for E691, CLEO, CDF, Babar and now CMS. For CMS, UCSB constructed and tested more than 4000 detector modules and half of the rods in the Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB). Roughly 40 people were involved in the production effort at Santa Barbara. UCSB also participated in the installation and testing of the rods and continues to be active in the commissioning of the tracker. In the past few years, the group has also contributed to other areas of the experiment such as the HLT trigger, muon reconstruction, tracking-on-demand, the Fireworks event display, the Physics Analysis Toolkit (PAT), the definition of primary datasets and the development of methods for applying On-Shell Effective Theory (OSET) to the characterization of new data. These efforts have all yielded tools that are accessible, and will hopefully be beneficial, to all of CMS.
The UCSB group is now very active in the CMS physics program with several of its faculty holding leadership roles in the physics organization. Members of the group have developed several new and interesting methods to understand and quantify Standard Model backgrounds to new physics searches.
The UCSB group currently has 10 people in residence at CERN, and this number will grow to 15 soon, in order to take part in detector operation, commissioning of the tracker, analysis of early data, and the CMS upgrades.
Sue Ann Koay |
Sue Ann Koay, graduate student at UCSB: I wandered into the curious field of physics because I thought I would be satisfied if even I could understand just one simple truth about the universe. Of course, it quickly educated me on how "simple truths" are the ones with the highest market price. As of this date, I am quite happily committed in the field of high energy physics analysis (mostly Beyond Standard Model searches), where I at least delude myself that I'm ekeing out that small outpost of knowledge.
One of Sue's hobby - digital art. |
As part of outside-of-work (insert snicker) life, I like to read things that are not physics textbooks, draw/paint, and tinker with my computer. The painting is almost exclusively digital -- lifestyle not
really compatible with non-moldy paint -- although I've dabbled in sculpting and glass-blowing at some point in my life. Other than that, I am an unreformed geek who thinks P vs. NP is a fascinating problem, and have never met a piece of software I didn't try to configure.
All who dare approach are warned: slightly hermit / mathematician / perfectionist tendencies apply. Worse, I'm not ashamed.
Watch the interview with Sue on You Tube:
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From OrlandoSentinel.com (5.10.2008):
Florida Institute of Technology professor gets a big bang out of Large Hadron Collider
Having probed the cosmos with the Hubble telescope, mapped human genetics and improved forecasts for weekend weather,
scientists still aren't sure about their theory for the biggest unknown of all. How does anything exist? Look for answers in your lifetime...
Read more:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news
/nationworld/orl-bigbang0508oct05,
0,3549515.story
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From LJWorld.com (21.09.2008):
KU plays part in particle collider experiments
Four Kansas University professors and several students and researchers have their hands in the largest physics experiment in generations.
International scientists completed the first major phase of the Large Hadron Collider this month near Geneva, Switzerland. The project is meant to smash particles to possibly open up research about the creation of the universe.
But there’s still plenty of work to be done...
Read more:
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/sep/21/
ku_plays_part_particle_collider_experiments/
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Courtesy: Rainer Wallny |
All eyes peeled and smiling faces when Benoit Cure announced that the magnet had reached 3.8 Tesla on the afternoon of Friday Oct 10th. This was a first in the underground cavern. It was followed by champagne and the ‘3.8 Tesla fest’.
Courtesy: Rainer Wallny |
Together with the results from first beams, this feat established that CMS is a fully operational experiment and the onset of CRAFT was not far away.
Austin Ball and Jim Virdee reported happily to the collaboration “Almost 2 years after the end of the MTCC, particular thanks go to the magnet group for their diligent work in moving and recommissioning the solenoid systems. The more recent efforts in measurement and mitigation of the effects of the fringe field have been an essential contribution to success and additional thanks go to the volunteers of the ad-hoc task group formed for this activity.”
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Simple tools like Plumb Lines and laser spirit levels were used to study the movements and inclinations due to the effects of the fringe field.
The cavern was declared as a declassified as a radiation area before 21-Oct largely in preparation for VIP tours for the LHC Inauguration ceremony on Oct 21st.
Laza Lazic reported on the progress with CRAFT: Last week has seen the beginning of CRAFT (Cosmic Run At ~Four Tesla). The magnet was smoothly powered up on Thursday October 16th and remained at its nominal field of 3.8 T ever since. The stable field allowed teams to start a series of high statistics runs with cosmics muons intended for calibration of the CMS Tracker. After the initially slow startup, the target rate of ~17 million cosmics per day was reached on Sunday October 19th.
Diagram of accumulated cosmic muons recorded in drift tubes (DT) and Silicon strip (SIST) tracker.
| Submitted by |
Archana Sharma |
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The magnet reached successfully the nominal field of 3.8T in the experimental cavern at Point 5 on October 10th 2008, just less than two years after the end of the Magnet Tests and Cosmic Challenge achieved in the surface hall in 2006.
Following the commissioning (up to 3T) performed last August and September, the detector was ready for a new climb up to the nominal field. As the magnet current was approaching the set value corresponding to 3.8T, the tension in the control room at Point 5 was also increasing and most of those present were holding their breath in the final minute! n the end it was finally one more great day for CMS.
The current was ramped up progressively to the nominal field while the positions and the displacements in the forward regions were thoroughly monitored and checked on site in the UXC5 by the coordination and commissioning teams. The magnet stayed at 2T overnight. During this 2-days powering exercise, the magnetic field was kept for about 3 hours at 3.8T (see fig. attached with current vs time), well enough to check that all the parameters were at nominal values and stable! As the current (field) was ramped up and down to different values, it could be verified that all parameters displayed perfectly reproducible values. The exercise ended by ramping down the field to zero by the use of power converter in reverse voltage mode.
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Current vs time |
The next step, already successfully begun, is running the coil at 3.8 T for CRAFT. A general shut down will take place soon in November to perform maintenance on general services and cryogenics. Before that, the magnet will be powered up to 4T, and a fast dump at 3.8T will terminate the run for 2008.
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| Andrea Gaddi |
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Benoit Curé |
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The Worldwide LHC Grid exhibition in the Globe on 3rd October 2008. |
Scientific insight from LHC data will be largely based upon accessing and processing, through the Grid, the information collected by the detectors. It took 7 years to build up the network of IT services and skills to an operational Grid, ready for LHC data taking, which is already used heavily for Monte Carlo simulations and cosmic ray analysis.
250 people were in the Globe on Oct. 3rd, to celebrate the opening of the World Wide LHC Grid (WLCG). The visitors were journalists from the radio/television/press, specialized IT media, IT professionals and actors in the Grid, each wanting to learn something more about this technology and to measure its impact on a growing number of sciences beyond particle physics. This was also the opportunity to honour the main players in this long development.
"The advantage is that all these centers are now
involved in the experiments and so there are
many options for injecting new resources when
they are required." Les Robertson, (from iSTGW
27 February 2008)
The Grid is not only about harnessing computing and archiving capabilities of 140 computing centres through Information and communication technology. It is also about pooling the numerous human abilities that are present in each of these sites. Indeed participation in the Gridfest was not restricted to those inside the Globe as a number of sites joined through video-conferences: a colourful illustration of what it is to collaborate around the clock with 12 hours of time difference –plus or minus! WLCG is indeed made of individuals who operate powerful IT systems with enthusiasm and dedication! Human interaction was at the centre of the talk by Lucas Taylor and about how a facility such as the CMS centre supports scientists by offering advanced communications tools between remote operations centres.
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Detailed discussion and exchanges unfolded on the ground floor during breaks and refreshments, where nine exhibits showed concrete applications of the Grid. WLCG and the Open Science Grid were central in running live visualization of the traffic over the network, complemented by Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb displays. Other applications were present such as paediatrics (with Health e-child, aiming at developing an integrated healthcare platform in Europe), drug design (with Wisdom, aiming to use it to identify molecules for curing malaria) and the ambitious project of the ITER fusion reactor.
On the CMS stand, the public could gain further insight on the how the data were being channelled from P5 to CERN IT, gateway to the Grid, and to the scientists' desks for analysis. Sanjay Padhi showed data reconstructions and analysis with Fireworks and Iguana. Andrea Sciaba shared "A day into the life of a CMS grid administrator", showing site accessibility tools and distributed data transfer monitoring.
The Grid computing for CMS. |
The CMS collaboration is comprised of 7 Tier-1s (1 in the USA, 1 in Asia and 5 in Europe) and about 40 Tier-2s. Along with the central system at CERN, the aggregated IT resources amount to around 20,000 computing cores, 15 PB of discs and 15 PB of tapes.
The web page for the gridfest:
http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/lhcgridfest/
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| Marie-Christine Sawley |
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