East gate closed today through Friday

From today through late afternoon on Friday, June 26, Fermilab's east entrance will be closed to allow Canadian National Railway to make repairs to the tracks and crossing in that area. All motor and bicycle traffic that normally enters through that gate will need to enter through the Pine or Wilson street gates on the west side. Check Fermilab Today for updates.

Cervando Castro: Steady hands and sharp eyes

Cervando Castro (left) watches the monitors and operates the remote crane control with technicians John Featherstone and Keith Anderson (center) for the NuMI experiment.

In a few weeks, Cervando Castro will use a remote control crane to change a key piece of equipment in Fermilab's neutrino program. He will be located behind several feet of concrete shielding at distances of up to 100 feet from the component. It's a job where steady hands and sharp eyes are essential.

"Cervando's very focused and very calm in high-pressure situations," said Kris Anderson, lead engineer for NuMI target hall operations. "We rely on him a lot."

As part of regular maintenance, Cervando will swap out the NuMI target, the piece of the experiment that helps to create neutrinos from protons. But, because the target sits directly in the beam path and becomes radioactive, Castro will use several video monitors and a remote crane control from behind shielding to do the job.

"Cervando has a lot of experience in the lab, he's our main crane guy," said Mike Andrews, NuMI shutdown coordinator.

While assembly and maintenance are relativelyf commonplace for the 25-year laboratory veteran, Castro was thrilled about his new challenges and his vertical commute when he started at NuMI.

"The first couple of times I was pretty excited to go down 150 feet into the NuMI target hall," Castro said.

Then, the diversity of tasks Castro's job includes--from assembling very delicate pieces of equipments to moving large chunks of concrete--keep him challenged. The largest piece of equipment he has had to move with the crane weighed 50,000 pounds. His schedule keeps him busy too. As a NuMI technician, Castro has to make himself available day or night as his job requires.

"I'm willing to do that because I want help make this place run smoothly," Castro said.

--Tia Jones

CERN reports on progress towards LHC restart

From Interactions.org, June 19, 2009

At the 151st session of the CERN Council today, CERN Director General Rolf Heuer confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) remains on schedule for a restart this autumn, albeit about 2-3 weeks later than originally foreseen. Following the incident of 19 September 2008 that brought the LHC to a standstill, a great deal of work has been done to understand the causes of the incident and ensure that a similar incident cannot happen again.

"Many new tests have been developed," said CERN's Director for accelerators, Steve Myers. "That's given us a wealth of information about the LHC splices, and confidence that we will be in good shape for running this year."

The root cause of the September incident was a faulty splice in the high-current superconducting cable between two magnets in LHC sector 3-4. New non-invasive techniques have been developed to investigate the splices, of which there are some 10,000 around the LHC ring, and determine whether they are safe for running or whether they need to be repaired. As part of this process, one more sector of the LHC, sector 4-5, is currently being warmed up. This will bring increased confidence that the splices are fully understood.

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Shutdowns are busy times

Ron Moore, a blogger for Quantum Diaries.

On Monday, we began a 3-month planned shutdown of the accelerators for maintenance, upgrades and a little construction for future operation. Although we may not be delivering beam to the experiments, there is plenty of activity going on around the Fermilab accelerator complex. The Accelerator Division "borrows" technicians from all over the lab to get all the work done.

For the Tevatron, maintenance is the biggest task. It has been 20 months since the last long shutdown ended and many items have accumulated on the to-do list.

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