Earthquake in Indiana causes spike in CDF beam data

On Tuesday, June 18, at about 12:39 p.m., a large loss of protons occured in the Tevatron beam. Scientists have correlated the proton loss to an earthquake of magnitude 5.0 that occurred two minutes earlier in southern Indiana, near the town of Darmstadt. The time delay between the quake and the loss fits the propagation velocity data posted by the US Geological Survey. Here the spike seen in the CDF data:

Todd Johnson from the Beams Division reports:

"I was in the Main Control room at that time, and Dean Still from the Tevatron Department called from the West Booster tower and asked the crew if they had noticed the building moving. A check of a peak-detecting vibration monitor on the Tevatron radiofrequency cavities showed a small spike, and looking for other effects on the accelerators turned up the larger loss at CDF. The crew then checked the US Geological Survey Web site and found the announcement of the earthquake.

"I'm only aware of one other earthquake-correlated machine effect at Fermilab, and that was way back in fixed-target days when there was a small quake that occurred during spill on one cycle. Extraction was clearly affected by the quake but no harm was done."