Training opportunities for collaborators
Lothar Bauerdick, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab, wrote this week's column.
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| Lothar Bauerdick |
This summer, several programs will prepare our collaborators and students for the upcoming data analysis phase of the CMS experiment. Many postdocs from Fermilab and U.S. universities are attending the joint Fermilab-CERN Hadron Collider Physics Summer School, which is taking place at CERN right now.
From August 3-5, the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab is organizing its next "J-TERM" course. The program will include presentations on physics topics for the early data taking and show what constitutes a full data analysis with examples from CDF and DZero. The program will feature both physics lectures and technical instructions, such as a presentation on common physics tools and beginner's and advanced hands-on tutorials.
In his talk at the Fermilab Users' Meeting last week, CERN's Sergio Bertolucci presented the enormous progress of the LHC on its way to high-energy collisions later this year. After the tight installation schedule last year, the shutdown after last year's LHC incident has given CMS the opportunity to install the last missing detector components and to make detector improvements. For example, the 6 percent of readout channels of the forward pixel detector that didn't work could be repaired and now 99.5 percent of all channels are working.
The CMS collaboration has learned an incredible amount about detector performance from recording and analyzing cosmic-ray events. Some 300 million events taken with the full detector and magnetic field switched on have led to detailed studies of calibration, timing, efficiencies as well as increased robustness of our software and detector systems. One result is that we now know the alignment of the CMS silicon tracker detector to 25-30 micrometers, a precision that otherwise would have had to wait for about 50 inverse picobarns of particle collision data.
Cosmic-ray data taking restarted last week, and the Remote Operations Center at Fermilab is again full of activities. From our center, we are taking remote detector, data quality and computing shifts. In early July, CMS will close its detector and begin a series of magnet tests and cosmic-ray runs. This fall, this will segue into taking data of colliding beams.
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