Comment by frob
19 days ago
I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once you get it there, it is go time all the time.
You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.
RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.
Thanks for contributing to research.
What was the “experimental season”? Why was there an experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?
Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and heaters are at the lowest.
NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of experiments performed while everyone is available to do so. We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL without any days off until we were done.
Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while they're up.
Doesn't power costs also affect shutdown periods? I know that CERN would shutdown in winter due to increased power costs and power demands around then. I suppose something similar may affect accelerators in the US.