CMS Experiment © 2011 CERNThis time last year, there were a lot of going's on at CERN. After the collider's first low energy collisions and an accident that took the machine offline for a year and a half of technical work, the Large Hadron Collider delivered its first 7 TeV collisions on the morning of March 30, 2010. I was standing in the atrium of my building, watching video being streamed from the different controls while reporters with big cameras ran around watching all the physicists. The LHC status page was prominently displayed, as we all prayed nothing would cause the machine to dump beam yet again.
Then all the flags went green for stable beams, and the first event displays of high energy collisions appeared. A new energy regime had been opened, something that only happens every twenty years or so in my field. For weeks afterward, we passed around pictures of events like proud new parents.
Spring and the end of March have come again. The primroses have popped up in every lawn while pale pink blossoms open on the trees. Tulips are starting to put in an appearance and birds can be heard squawking at 4 a.m., and collisions have resumed after the winter hiatus at CERN. There was much, much less fanfare this time. There is also now much more data.
ATLAS Experiment © 2011 CERN
1 comment:
Of course there's less fanfare... when people know the world isn't going to instantly be destroyed by a man-made black hole, they just aren't interested anymore... kind of like, "Man on the moon? Yeah yeah, that was SO last decade" But it's still cool to people who know what it means.
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