CERN to set goals for first LHC physics

At the conclusion of a workshop held in Chamonix this week, recommendations have been made to the CERN management for the restart schedule of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). If accepted in a management meeting on Monday, these recommendations will ensure that the LHC starts to produce physics data in late 2009, running through the winter and on to autumn 2010 at an energy of 5 TeV per beam and ensuring sufficient data for the experiments to produce their first new physics results.

"These recommendations represent the best way forward for the LHC and for the field of particle physics in general," said Steve Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Chair of the Chamonix workshop.

Among the topics discussed in Chamonix was the underlying cause of the incident that brought the LHC to a standstill on 19 September last year.

The incident was traced to a faulty electrical connection between segments of the LHC's superconducting cable. Since the incident, enormous progress has been made in developing techniques to detect any small anomaly.

These will be used in order to get a complete picture of the resistance in the splices of all magnets installed in the machine. This will allow improved early warning of any additional suspicious splices during operation.

The early warning systems will be in place and fully tested before restarting the LHC.

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Implementing integrated quality assurance memo

All employees should have received a memo from Director Pier Oddone on Friday. Employees who are off site, or those who did not receive the memo, can access it here.

New Wilson Hall dosimetry badge drop box

A new dosimetry badge drop box is now available in Wilson Hall to return dosimetry badges. The new drop box (pictured at left) is located on the ground floor of Wilson Hall next to the ATM machine.

Energy secretary promises to move quickly to spend stimulus funds

From Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2009

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that he wants half of the roughly $35 billion to $40 billion proposed for Energy Department programs in the economic-stimulus package to be spent within a year.

Mr. Chu said he is prepared to overhaul the way the agency operates to quickly direct the money to projects on weatherization, energy efficiency and support for renewable energy.

"We've got to do this, and we've got to do it in a way that has not been done at the Department of Energy," Mr. Chu said. "I think this is solvable. And not only solvable -- we've got to do it. Otherwise it's just going to be a bust."

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Mequon company helps smash subatomic particles

From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
Feb. 6, 2009

John DeFord has a red-blooded American boy's dream job:

He helps people get things going really fast so they can smash them and watch what happens.

In a bland suburban office building shared with an accountant, a lawyer and a psychic adviser, DeFord maintains a remote outpost in the quest to understand the most fundamental forces and structure of nature.

His small company, Simulation Technology and Applied Research Inc., works with physicists and engineers at the country's leading particle accelerators - massive complexes designed to hurl bits of atoms through tubes at 600 million mph or so, then ram them into a target and break them into even tinier pieces.

The idea is to find out what the universe is really made of.

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