
As noted here, CMS started observing LHC beam splash events for the first time in 2009 on Saturday evening (Geneva time)...

My colleagues have reported beam arrived and was detected by the CMS detector at 20:05 Geneva time! (CMS is one of the two big detectors as the Large Hadron Collider). Exciting times!

These LHC posts appear in two places: the main blog site, and the facebook page. The main site supports video, which currently don’t show up in the facebook posts. Two of my previous posts had video, so check those out on the main site! ...

I don’t really know what to think of this, but apparently there’s a news story going around that a piece of bread found its way onto an electrical connection in one of the LHC’s above-ground buildings leading to a failure of a cooling unit. The ...

You might think it odd that work has already started to upgrade parts of the ATLAS detector, even before the LHC has started running! As I wrote in a previous post, one of the key operating parameters for the LHC is luminosity, i.e., the beam intensity...

It was reported last week by Dennis Overbye at the New York Times that the LHC is only going to reach a center-of-mass energy of 2.2 TeV (i.e. an energy of 1.1 TeV per beam) before the winter shutdown...

Brain Cox explains in this 3 minute talk from Feb 2009 what went wrong at CERN last year, and why doing continuing this work, despite setbacks, is worth it...

For those that missed it, Stephen Colbert did a small bit on the LHC on his show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central...

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30cBrian Coxwww.colbertnation.comColbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorReligion Brian Cox was on the Colbert Report last Wednesday, and in response to the idea that the future is somehow stopping us from turning on a high-energy particle accelerator,...

A couple of months ago I blogged about how at ATLAS we’re using cosmic rays to study the detector. Well with data impending, the work that my group and I have been doing was submitted to become internal ATLAS document last week. This process was new to me… so I thought I’d share. Not ...

Wow, what a terrible trip to CERN I’ve been having. I’m here for the semi-annual CMS computing and offline software workshop week, but I took ill while here and have been confined to my room in the hostel for the past two days. That and my jet lag have totally put me off my game. I...

In a previous post, I mentioned that ATLAS will be collecting enormous amounts of data, approximately 6 Petabytes/year (i.e., 6,000,000 Gigabytes). How in the world are we going to handle it, and how do we make it available to all physicists on ATLAS...

It is almost 40 minutes past midnight. I just came back from my last CMS DAQ (Data Acquisition) trainee shift. Strangely, I still have a lot of energy, so the first thing that comes to mind, after eating something (shifts make me hungrier than usual), is to keep doing something productive...

First beam in the LHC since last year! As reported by the BBC, last weekend particles were injected into the LHC for the first time in over a year...










