MINERvA caps detector with final module

Members of the MINERvA collaboration pose in front of the detector on Monday, March 15. after installing the final plane.

Three technicians stood underground last week glancing between a walkie-talkie and a semicircular hole in the ceiling leading 330 feet up to the surface.

"This is the last one," said technician Steve Ruzzano, trying to suppress a smile.

The 120th module of the MINERvA detector was on its way. For about a year, the collaboration for the neutrino experiment had been collecting the 4-ton, hexagonal steel planes into what resembled a horizontal stack of 11-foot quarters in the MINOS near detector hall.

Collaborators first put the idea for such a detector into writing in June 2002, said co-spokesperson Kevin McFarland, who worked on the document.

"This has been the culmination of a huge amount of planning, execution, getting funding, recruiting, hiring people and figuring out how to work together," he said.

"To see it all come together and to see the actual detector up there. I have to rub my eyes on occasion."

The crew lowered the planes, each less than 2 inches thick, into the MINOS near detector hall by attaching them to a wheeled frame and rolling them down the flat side of the hole. The crew could see little more than two cables dipping into the shadows from above until the frame crawled into the light about 10 feet above them.

The technicians gingerly caught the frame and attached it to a large, pinkish cart to move it toward the detector. Then they hooked the module to a crane built into the ceiling of the cavern.

The crew slowly rotated the plane into alignment with the rest of the modules, as if closing the final page of a book. As the plane swung into its parallel position, two words written on its face in white grease pencil came into view: "The End."

The collaboration may have reached the end of the detector, but this is hardly the end of the story for MINERvA.

-- Kathryn Grim

CERN sets date for first attempt at 7 TeV collisions in the LHC

With beams routinely circulating in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV, the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator, CERN has set the date for the start of the LHC research programme. The first attempt for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) is scheduled for March 30.

"With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we're on the verge of launching the LHC physics programme," explained CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. "But we've still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it's a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way."

Between now and 30 March, the LHC team will be working with 3.5 TeV beams to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the particle detectors from stray particles. All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions can begin.

"The LHC is not a turnkey machine," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "The machine is working well, but we're still very much in a commissioning phase and we have to recognize that the first attempt to collide is precisely that. It may take hours or even days to get collisions."

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Spring weather wakes local butterfly population

Fermilab's butterfly expert Tom Peterson snapped this image of a Mourning Cloak butterfly last week. The Mourning Cloak butterfly is among many species that overwinter as adults in our woods and were drawn out during the first, sunny, 65-degree days of the year last week.

OSG All Hands meeting

Last week, 183 researchers and vendors gathered at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois for the Open Science Grid's annual All Hands Meeting.

In addition to hosting workshops for CMS and ATLAS computing meetings, sessions covered a variety of topics, including security, virtualization, cloud computing, biology applications, reports from European colleagues, and the future of US cyberinfrastructure. This year also marked the first vendor and e-demonstration session.

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