In Celebration of the Large Hadron Collider
Today, September 10th, 2008 marks the beginning of the worlds, and histories, largest and most expensive scientific experiment ever.
Today, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland, comes on-line.
One of the main detectors, and indeed a fundamental part LHC, is called CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid. At the end-caps of the detector are cathode-strip chambers (CSC) used to measure muon rates and positions.
photographer: unknown
The end-caps on CMS are very large and no one had ever built CSC's as large as they needed to be for the detector. So a group of scientists at Fermilab (FNAL) in Batavia, IL was set to working on the problem (as a part of the overall, and very large, involvement by the US).
And, as it so happened, my application for summer employment (following my sophomore year at Valparaiso University) at FNAL was approved and I was assigned to the group studying the cathode-strip chambers. It was easily the single most exciting job I have ever had and possibly ever will have. I was at Fermilab, one of the premier locations for particle physics, working with real scientists, taking real measurements, collaborating, exploring, and in the end, (in conjunction with an undergrad from Purdue) writing a technical paper on the subject for the CMS project.
The title of the paper is: Study of the T0 Cathode Strip Chamber Prototype at FNAL and, while all the technical papers used to be available at the USCMS site, they don't appear to be any longer. I don't know how the design changed after I left (I did not keep in touch with the group) nor do I even know if anyone else even read my report. To be honest, I don't really care (especially about the last part.) My roll was as minor as one could have, but I had a roll nonetheless. The experience of that summer put me most of a semester ahead of everyone entering Nuclear Physics Lab in the fall and afforded me a taste what being a scientist was all about. Not a month goes by that I don't, in some way, reflect on that lost dream.
I have a PDF of the paper saved somewhere, but cannot immediately find it. Fortunately for me, the web provided another location: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/. Thank you Pennsylvania State University.
Study of the T0 Cathode Strip Chamber Prototype at FNAL.
So here's to science and here's to scientific discovery. May the work of the thousands upon thousands of Large Hadron Collider scientists and engineers bear wondrous and extraordinary fruit.