A long-distance success
Today's column is by Lothar Bauerdick, director of the CMS Center at Fermilab.
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| Lothar Bauerdick |
Making the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments work is top priority for Fermilab and the global particle physics community. For Fermilab people, of course, working on the CMS experiment is quite different from working at the Tevatron: you can't simply walk over to the experiment to do some work or to ask somebody else a question. Nevertheless, our transatlantic collaboration has been a success--across institutional, geographic and time-zone boundaries.
For the CMS collaboration to be successful requires both a strong base here at Fermilab and a strong team over at CERN, connected via excellent communication. At Fermilab, we've created the CMS Center, which includes the LHC Physics Center on the 11th floor of Wilson Hall and the LHC@FNAL Remote Operations Center, located on the first floor. At CERN we have a great team on the ground: about 20 percent of the Fermilab CMS group is at CERN for long-term stays, and others are visiting frequently. We keep close contact via email, phone calls, videoconferencing, and instant messaging.
The CMS Silicon Tracker group is a great example of how people at Fermilab and CERN work together. The CMS Tracker has 2,200 square feet of silicon strip sensors and 10 million readout channels. Many of the modules were made and tested at Fermilab's Silicon Detector Facility and then assembled into the full CMS tracker at CERN. Commissioning of the detector is in full swing at the CERN Tracker Integration Facility, prior to mounting it into the CMS detector later this year. We always have about five Fermilab tracker people at CERN, working with the other members of the CMS tracker team.
Earlier this year, the CMS tracker group began to take cosmic muon data. Taking shifts in the LHC@FNAL Remote Operations Center, Fermilab and U.S. university physicists are helping the team at CERN to run the silicon detector and to monitor data quality. The data are transferred to the Fermilab Tier-1 computing center, and the team here is reconstructing the raw data, debugging the tracker reconstruction software, commissioning the detector readout and developing an understanding of detector performance by studying noise levels, dead channels, etc. This sharing of work is a great success. At times, we already operate round-the-clock like we expect it to be when the LHC is running next year.
For many years, people were skeptical whether Fermilab and the U.S. particle physics community could play a major role in the LHC and its experiments. Today, it's clear that we can.
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