Tevatron: Day of Doom

[beamjockey]

The final store is now circulating in the Tevatron. At breakfast, it was just below 100E30 luminosity units (per square centimeter per second).

The Tevatron's final crew is on shift. It will be a long day for them; after the 2 PM ceremony, after the officials and camera crews and Tevatron designers have left the Main Control Room for the party, the crew will be putting the Tevatron into standby, as well as continuing to operate other accelerators.

Picnic tents are up in the Horseshoe. TV cameras are in place in Ramsey Auditorium and the MCR. Lighting has been adjusted and links have been tested. An absurdly large TV has been placed in the MCR, so that the people there may see people speaking on the Auditorium stage.

Fermilab endures. Here are plans for the future.

Tevatron fact sheet.

About the shutdown process.

The original 1979 plan: A Report on the Design of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Superconducting Accelerator. Dr. Helen Edwards, one of its co-authors, will be performing the shutdown.

Comments

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

One of the nonsensical, never-gonna'-happen things that were talked about in the control room was to set up the beam abort button so that when Helen pushed it, a voice would come through the speakers saying "I'm sorry, Helen, but I can't let you do that."

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

That would have been epic.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

What I wanted to do was push the Tevatron to its design energy. It has been operating at 980 GeV, and never went to 1000 GeV, because reliability was thought to be better a little below that. Nobody wanted to run the risk of damage that might keep the machine off for days or weeks--perhaps merely a quench, perhaps a breakdown that would require replacing one or more magnets.

The alternatives were considered, and the lab management declined a go-for-broke lunge for higher energy. Instead, the Tevatron ran smoothly and gave productive data up until its very last moment.

Another idea Operations had, according to Dave, was to conduct a "24-house quench," which would have made a big noise around the entire ring. But it also would have involved what one cryo expert liked to call "giving the helium back to God."