August 30, 2005
Today is my last day of a week of shifts for MINOS--it turns out that it is much easier and more efficient to run an accelerator 24 hours a day 7 days a week than to just turn 
it on for banker's hours, so that means that if we want to make the most neutrinos, then we also take beam 24/7. To make every proton count we want to be watching over the detector and the beamline while all this is going on so that if something goes wrong we can fix it (or call the right people to fix it) as quickly as possible. Being on day shift is also somewhat of a social thing--people are always wandering in to get a shot of espresso and see how things are going: how many protons we're getting (21 trillion a shot!) and how often (every 2 seconds), and sometimes people just marvel at the high 
number of neutrinos streaming by in the near detector (at the right is a picture of the signals that we get from neutrinos in just one shot of 20 trillion protons...).
The thing that amazes me most about this week of shifts is just how different things are now than they were on my old experiment (NuTeV, shown at left). The last time I was on shift I was pregnant with Isaac (who is now 8), and I can't decide what makes the biggest difference: going from a 35 person experiment to a 200 person experiment, going from a 15 kWatt proton beam to a 200kWatt proton beam, or going from a handwritten logbook covered with scotch tape and coffee stains to a web-based logbook. Of course, not feeling Isaac kicking me while looking at plots is a switch too!
Increasing the number of collaborators by a factor of 6 means that you 
have to have crystal clear instructions for how to monitor everything, since people can only be expert on a small piece of the whole experiment, and because people only have to do about 3 week-long shifts per year. When I started my shift a week ago I knew very little about our detector other than what it was made of and how it was read out, but for the past week I have compared dozens of graphs with "what it's supposed to look like" and at the 
end I even taught the new guy (shown at left) how to do the same. The sobering side of this is that if something actually does go wrong, I just look up who the expert is and call, I don't actually fix anything myself. Another thing that happens when you have a factor of 6 more people on the experiment is that you can also spend a factor of 6 more on the espresso machine (also shown at left).
Increasing the power of the protons by a factor of about 12 means that we put a lot more effort into making sure everything is stable and you never shoot a proton where you don't want one. If the proton beam wanders off by even a half a milimeter they turn the beam off and figure out how it happened, fix it, and then shoot the beam back 
to the center of the target again. This makes the price for turning the beam off high, so all these devices that steer the proton beam and detect where it goes are very robust. But it's the price you have to pay if you're going to shoot a beam of neutrinos all the way to Minnesota and actually see a few interact every day! I couldn't help but check the Far Detector Event Web Page at the end of each shift to see if we collected any events on my watch: see the picture at the left of today's "beam neutrino" event.
in grad school who came from a tiny town in Italy: Montottone, about a 26 km drive from the Adriatic coast. Including her wedding I have now been to Montottone 4 times, and each time I go I get something different out of the visit. 
