Scientists across the world are eagerly awaiting the startup of the Large Hadron Collider, under construction in Switzerland. This also is the case at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, where scientists gathered today for the second day of their annual Users' meeting. The day started out with presentations on the status of the LHC and the CMS experiment, one of the two general collider detectors that are being built along the 27-km ring of what will be the world's most powerful proton smasher.
Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer at CERN, provided an update on the LHC schedule. The cooldown of the last LHC sector of superconducting magnets started at the end of May and the entire machine should be at its operating temperature of 1.9 K in July. This temperature is necessary for the magnets to become superconducting and to achieve strong magnetic fields. The magnets steer beams of proton around the LHC ring and make them collide at the centers of large particle detectors such as CMS. Four of the eight sectors have already been cooled to 1.9 K. Here is a chart of the current temperatures of all LHC sectors.
The CMS collaboration plans to carry out its final test of its detector at the end of July using cosmic rays, showers of particles that rain on Earth. Even 100 meters underground, the CMS detector will see a decent rate of muons creating signals in various detector subcomponents.
"This will be a full dress rehearsal," said Joel Butler, US CMS project manager.
Scientists from US institutions represent about a third of the 2848 scientists of the CMS collaboration. "There are currently 203 graduate students in US CMS, and the number is growing," said Butler.
The LHC experiments will shed light on how elementary particles obtain mass, look for dark matter particles, and search for extra dimensions, just some of the many research goals for its experiments. And, of course, scientists hope for the unexpected.
"The LHC is a discovery machine. There could be something new and exciting that shows up early," said Butler. "We believe we are ready for the event samples that we will get."
Here is Butler's talk (PDF).
See all reports from the Fermilab Users' Meeting 2008 here.
