General CMS/MIT News

The CERN director goes through her usual New Years address and presents accomplishments of the last year and the plans for the coming year(s).

As usual the talk is brief and hits all the highlights. The updated LHC schedule is hidden in there on slide 27.

After the usual one month heavy ion run was canceled due to energy cost issues and the not that smooth startup of the LHC at least there was one day reserved to set up heavy ions and give it a go. The CMS DAQ reports good high rates but otherwise pretty smooth running and look at that nice Heavy Ion event. Credit for the image goes to Dima.

Make sure to tell people of our search. It is an open search but we will be looking very hard for a new junior faculty to join the CMS experiment here at MIT.

https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/23062

Today (08/25/2022 at 1pm) Miao defended her thesis successfully. She talked for about 50 minutes about here massive thesis (~330 pages) and easily sailed through what she referred to as the grilling session. Iain (zoom) and Christoph, apart from Markus, were also on the committee. Miao's parents were logged in on zoom and must have marveled at the display. A short thank you note all in Chinese rounded up the defense about:

"Precision Measurements of Vector Boson Scattering Production and Searches for Charged Higgs Bosons at the Large Hadron Collider"

It was a great time having Miao on our team here at MIT. Her love and appetite for chocolate was legendary and led us to celebrate her defense with a chocolate pie and a glass (or two) of Californian Chandon. Which seems appropriate considering that she will start the Chamberlain Fellowship at the University of California Berkeley.

All the best for the years to come, unfortunately with ATLAS :-)

Defending:

Miao and Markus, her advisor:

You can follow the progress on LHC Page1: https://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1

The Project Management tools GuiDO has for 8 years lived on t3desk004.mit.edu in an office of the 5th or 4th floor in Building 24. Now finally it has been set free with its newest release on a machine specifically designed just for it running on it. The new location is

http://guido.mit.edu/redmine

Maybe we are going to get ride of the 'redmine' part of the location :-)

From Markus:

"Yesterday, the LHC experiments met with the CERN leaders to discuss the Run 3 schedule. The new baseline foresees beam commissioning Feb 2022, ramp-up May 2022, physics from June 2022 (Feb 2022 scenario). CMS will use this extra time to work on shielding. If ATLAS does not manage to get the muon upgrade under control, there is a chance for LHC commissioning in 2021 and a bit more time for physics in 2022 (Nov 2021 scenario). See the graph below. There is no impact on the LS3 and Run 4 schedule. The situation will be re-evaluated in October."

Sid handed in his thesis on his birthday (01/29) and shared the joy with the group serving one of the famous Lemon-Meringue Pies from Flour. He will be joining the Fidelity investment firm in Boston and we hope he will not squander all of MIT retirement funds. ;-)

A hearty congratulations to the first of four students having joined in 2014.

PS- no bet lost here, but the planned defense was August some time ago.

We now finally understand the reason for the network outage at our High Performance Research Computing Center at BATES (the Tier-2). A tree fell on the optical fibre bringing the 100 Gbps network to the lab.

Photo credit goes to our own Mike.

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.