A Working Collider

Today we only had three lectures and got the afternoon 'off' to go on organised tours around the FermiLab facilities. Which sounds more interesting than it actually was, because their collider is actually running, it's not possible to see the beampipe in the tunnel or the experiments in their caverns. But it was still pretty cool seeing the control rooms, as well as the LINAC and new computing center, though I am disappointed we didn't get to see the neutrino experiments.



So here is a photo of the control room, they had just finished injecting a store of protons and antiprotons into the Tevatron, so things were changing on the display screens. I felt kind of bad taking photos since there were people in there, but it's cool with all the different screens, all showing different monitoring plots. If you want to see the live status of the machine, it is up on the web here.



This is a photo from the D0 control room, where you can see the changes in technology in computer screens, and things happening in their detector. The D0 detector is like a smaller version of the ATLAS detector, it also has an inner solenoid and an outer toriodal magnetic field, though theirs is solid iron rather than air-core. It also has a liquid argon colorimeter. But both the CDF and D0 detectors are so much smaller, as is the Tevatron. The Tevatron only accelerates protons and antiprotons to 1TeV, so their ring is much smaller - 1km in radius and only about 7m underground. The detectors are about half the size of ATLAS, and were built in halls next to the ring and slid into place. So now all you can see is empty halls, which isn't so interesting, though CDF does have a life size poster of their detector there. For live events from either detector go here.



If you recognise this little guy, I pronounce you a nerd. He's the tape robot for one of their grid storage systems in their grid computing centre, which is a new centre built to handle the processing and storage which now doesn't fit into their original Feynmann computing centre. I include him as robots are cool. *grins* Actually, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but the computing centre was kind of cool, with the different rooms for the different purposes, storage, networking, power and processing.