Staggering

A better picture of the beam hitting the scintillator. Does anyone remember learning what happens when electrons break the speed of light in a medium? Blue Cherenkov light. Mmm. Look it up. Anyway, it is way off centre here. This nifty piece of instrumentation was essential to get the beam on target to hit the carbon and lead (within the annulus between the red and black lines).


What the output should be:

What it was after I destroyed the signals with carbon and lead. Mwah ha ha ha ha. And they said it could never be done! They said the effect would be small! They were... well, actually I have no idea what this means. Dammit, now I have to do some thinking.

During

Tomorrow is the 24 hous from hell. How productive can you be during a shift that long? The first owl was not productive. CS and I were tired when we started and got more incapable of thought as the night wore on. The optics failed and we could not get a low and stable beam current for calibration. Yesterday was a day shift and we had the invaluable aid of MW and RA. The four of us did the calibration from 1e9 to 1e6 electrons per bunch and then got the optics working and even went so far as to put the scintillator into the beamline. We got the lovely picture above on our CCD camera. You can see that the radiation has knocked quite a few pixels out of commission but it can still show us the bright blue cherenkov light.

Death by Ood... I mean Shifts

Date       Type         People

7th         Swing        cc
10th      Owl            cc cs
11th       Day           pb cs
13th      Day            pb
              Swing        cs
14th      Owl            cc


Yikes. What a week. Okay, I personally only have three shifts but as the person running the experiment how can I not be present for the other ones? How on earth could cs and pb do anything without me? So that makes it a great triple shift, 24 hours of action spanning the 13th and 14th. I should complain and request we swap the swing with someone but I daresay I will be shouted down for the very good reason that once we have it set up to run the experiment, we should just keep on running.

I knew there had to be a reason my office had a sofa in it.

SF Dreaming

(Board post... because skit doubts I am using this blog for its original purpose any more)

I went to San Francisco with friends... real friends maybe? At long last? Maybe. A round robin email gathered up a few souls (well, five) to see Superman at the IMAX. On the one hour train journey, we chatted amiably about our courses, adapting to America and so on. In San Francisco my suggestions on where to go for lunch were greeted with enthusiasm so we grabbed lunch to go from Wholefoods and ate in the park. On the way Pablo said "The buildings here are so familiar to me... it took me a while to work out that I knew them from Charmed." On my look, "no, I am not ashamed to admit it." I grinned and confessed my once obsession with the show. We sat in the sunshine and chatted about this and that but the chat turned to silence. Tentatively, I mentioned that it would be nice if we could see the Spider-man trailer (we didn't- I didn't really expect we would). Sudan grinned and said "have you been watching that?" "Been watching that?" I said, picking up on the odd choice of words. "That implies you know me and my Spidey-obsessed ways!" He replied, "Well, personally I have been doing work and flicking back to the apple site to watch it every hour or so." Sigh. Cue Spider-man 3 discussion mainly about Venom and why as a generation we are prone to being Spidey fans. After the film my day was made even better by discovering a comic book shop in the cinema complex. There were no copies of Civil War or any tie-ins left but I found a bound volume of Supreme Powers: Nighthawk. At the counter the guy asked "is this for you?" looking impressed with my choice. "It's really good, incredibly dark." I replied that I was a fan of the Supreme Powers writer and adored how dark it could be, citing the mass slaughter in the previous volume. Another guy at the counter asked whether I had read the Fantastic Four volumes by the writer and I confessed I hadn't because I didn't like the Fantastic Four... I may have made myself one enemy there but the first guy looked pleased. So, then we wandered the mean streets in search for a non-franchise coffee place and I scored by dragging everyone to the gate of Chinatown which actually has a rather nice French cafe and bar. Everyone was relaxed and chilled (it was rather cold in San Fran...). We caught the 7pm train home and I sat next to Pablo and discussed the nature of physics alongside comic books and Gaiman and Pratchett... It was sweet. Finally I went home and rewatched Doctor Who: Love & Monsters which really completed the warm buzz.

It was a fantastic day. If you ignore the first three hours spent watching football.