The server was completely overloaded for unknown reasons, such that emails would not be sent. A reboot resolved the situation leading to a massive amount of emails being sent as they were still in spool directory.

Back on track for now.

Today (11/15/2016) Aram defended his thesis successfully. Properly dressed for the occasion he talked about:

"Electroweak physics and evidence for a Higgs Boson decaying to a pair of tau leptons with the CMS Detector"

It was a great time having him on the team and we wish him all the best at FNAL.

-- on a side note: he did loose his bet handing in the first draft on September 1, 2016 but he paid the debt of the 2 bottles of Jack Daniels.

BIG congrats to our Rising Star and Lightning Round Winner: Zeynep Demiragli!!

But MIT is all over the USLUA Landscape

Zeynep Demiragli (MIT postdoc) and Javier Duarte (was MIT UROP with our group) are winners of the Lightning Round competition.

Phil Ilten (MIT postdoc and UROP with our group) and Ian Moult (Jesse Thalers PhD student) gave great talks.

The official message!

=========================================================

Subject: USLUA Lightning Round winners announcement
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2016 16:18:46 -0600
From: Jessica Metcalfe <jessica.metcalfe@gmail.com>
To: usluo@fnal.gov
CC: Harvey Newman <newman@hep.caltech.edu> =====================

Dear US LHC Users Association members,

Last week we had an engaging meeting of the USLUA in Berkeley. The Lightning Round competition for students and postdocs was fast paced and of excellent quality. We would like to take this moment to thank all of those who participated!

The top 6 winners were announced at the end of the meeting, they are:

Demiragli, Zeynep        Massachusetts Inst. of Technology 
 Duarte, Javier Mauricio  Fermi National Accelerator Lab. 
 Hyneman, Rachel Jordan   University of Michigan
 Ravaioli, Emmanuele      LBNL
 Shuve, Brian             SLAC
 Swiatlowski, Maximilian  University of Chicago

In addition, we would like to announce the following people, who also gave excellent talks, to join us on the annual USLUA DC trip:

Gleyzer, Sergei             University of Florida
 Grogan, Dayton Parker       Duke University
 Iten, Phil                  MIT
 Khader, Mazin Woodrow       Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 McCormack, William Patrick  LBNL
 Meehan, Samuel Ross         University of Washington
 Moult, Ian                  Berkeley/LBL
 Zeng, Qi                    SLAC National Accelerator  Laboratory

Thanks for all those who helped host, organize, and attended. We hope to see you again next year!

Best Regards,
USLUA executive committee

Latest information from Technical Coordination about TS1 decision: It's just been decided (DG scheduling meeting) that Technical Stop 1 will be maintained but the duration will be reduced to 54 hours: 06:00 Tuesday 7 June through 12:00 Thursday 9 June.

Technical coordination is deciding whether it is feasible in this time period to ramp down the magnet or not.

Since this weekend it is finally official that Markus tenure case has move forward. This is a big big deal and very well deserved. Congratulations to Markus. I am looking forward to the next 20 year and more!

Also great to hear that Dan made it through the ORALs, Congrats! After Xinmei leading the way on April 26 he is the second of our students recently to passed. Up next is Sid! Best of luck!

In an effort to stimulate the dull Sunday at CERN CP challenged Aram about his thesis completion. He offered him 2 bottles of Jack Daniels if he could finish the thesis before or on September 1 (any time zone is legal, but we talk about the year 2016).

The crucial completion is handing in the final draft to the thesis committee, which means the defence will be scheduled in order of 2 weeks after that.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086451-weasel-halts-lhc-experiments-after-chewing-on-a-power-cable/

Dear Colleagues

it is with a lot of pleasure that we share with you the fact that we have now the magnet fully On. This is the successful end of a long process: we would like to acknowledge the extraordinary effort from the CERN cryo team over the last months and of the CMS technical coordination team which has continuously monitored the progress and helped to reach this result.

We are now looking forward to a great 2016 data taking campaign!

Austin & Tiziano

Approval granted by the Collaboration board. Congratulations everybody!¶

Shahram Rahatlou - Physics Coordinator
Markus Klute - PPD
Elizabeth Sexton-Kennedy - Offline and Computing
Silvia Goy Lopez - Run Coordination
Simone Gennai - Trigger

Stable beams declared a little while ago (April 22, 2016). According to Tiziano today at the CB, the schedule has changed such that they start scrubbing on Monday (not Wednesday). Our magnet should be at 3.8 Tesla on Tuesday afternoon. He expects that the accelerator will declare further scrubbing pointless after Wednesday.

Except for the initial part of the ramp this weekend, we will be taking field ON data!