Fermilab Today Monday, March 1, 2010
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Rick Cavanaugh named new LPC co-coordinator

Ian Shipsey (left) and Rick Cavanaugh are the co-coordinators for the LPC at Fermilab.

The elevators in Fermilab's 16-story Wilson Hall move slowly. According to legend, Robert Wilson, the laboratory's founding director, designed them that way to encourage conversation between their passengers.

Rick Cavanaugh, a physicist with a joint appointment between the University of Illinois-Chicago and Fermilab, remembers meeting Dan Green for the first time in one of those infamous elevator rides in 2002.

Cavanaugh, then at University of Florida, was visiting the lab as a new member of the CMS collaboration. Green was just starting to develop the LHC Physics Center on the 11th floor of Wilson Hall as a place to provide support for CMS collaborators working in the U.S.

"He communicated the value of remote collaboration tools," Cavanaugh said. "He knew it would be essential for his vision of how the LPC should be."

Little did they know that almost eight years later, Cavanaugh would be stepping into Green's shoes as the new co-coordinator of the LPC.

Cavanaugh, a computing specialist who hails from Alaska, has always been a believer in remote operations and couldn't be more thrilled that Green's dreams have become a reality since that elevator conversation.

Today rather than flying across the Atlantic, CMS collaborators in the U.S. can take shifts in the Remote Operations Center at Fermilab, monitoring data quality and the detector subsystems. The LPC has also increasingly become a way for its roughly 70 scientists from Fermilab and international universities to stay connected to their collaborators at CERN and around the globe.

"In the past, the tendency was to believe that discoveries in accelerator-based particle physics could only take place at the accelerator," said Ian Shipsey, a physicist at Purdue University and Cavanaugh's co-coordinator at the LPC. "A discovery requires a good understanding of the data, which is achieved collectively by the large number of physicists congregating at the accelerator."

Especially at the start of an experiment, a scientist 4,000 miles from the accelerator does not have immediate access to this understanding. The LPC, however, overcomes this disadvantage by bringing together a large community of experts and enabling them to participate as if they were at the accelerator.

"This is unprecedented," Shipsey said.

Cavanaugh and Shipsey know that they have big shoes to fill when it comes to taking over for Green, who invented the LPC concept and has officially led the center since 2007.

"His dreams made the LPC what it is today," Shipsey said. "We want to continue to make those dreams a reality."

- Elizabeth Clements

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