Jose Ocariz

HELEN: the future started in Rio

We had the first plenary meeting of the HELEN programme in Rio, involving representatives from all countries involved.

Luciano Maiani, the HELEN coordinator, wrote a very nice article in the CERN courier. I have also blogged a couple of times about HELEN (here and here).

The meeting goals were: to perform the first selection of applications, and effectively start the programme. About one hundred candidates were selected, and will receive a HELEN fellowship, mostly for exchanges between HEP labs in Europe and Latin America.

This is great news. CERN is of course the main destination of the programme, but there are also activities related to DESY, the Auger experiment, and to GRID technologies.  National HEP laboratories in Spain, Italy, France and Portugal will also be hosting students and young researchers from Latin America, and sending european physicists to Latin America as well.

This is great news. This first meeting with all representatives was an excellent opportunity to discuss about the future of the project, and new ideas arose. We are very confident that HELEN will boost the latin-american HEP community!

More information will be appearing at the HELEN web site: http://www.roma1.infn.it/exp/helen/

A recipe (not) to deal with jetlag

I was back to SLAC for the BaBar collaboration meeting. My schedule was pretty tight, as I had to be in Paris until sunday, and I needed to flight back to Paris on friday at latest. And with a talk scheduled for friday 10h30...

Moreover, the material I wanted to show on the talk was not ready. Most of the developments were complete, and also the slides, but the idea was to run a few hundreds of "toy Monte-Carlo experiments" and show the results. And those toys were still running the night before the talk.

"Toy Monte-Carlo" is a powerful statistical tool, in which we simulate what the outcome of many "BaBar-like" experiments would be, if all experimental and analysis issues were under control. In this way, we can compare the specific output of our single, true, BaBar experiment, with all these toys. This technique has now become a standard in the field.

So finally I gave the talk, with really "fresh" results that I just had time to add on my slides (including one typo in a table full of numbers, but this did not escape scrutiny from our conveners...) and headed to the airport just afterwards.

Arriving in France the day after, just in time to rush home and get ready for my brother-in-law's marriage. Followed a very nice party, in which we stayed until 5am, dancing and chatting with friends.

On monday morning, I had to give a lecture to my new students... it was nice to rediscover the teaching, back to University's life after almost 2 years doing only research at SLAC. I enjoy very much the contact with students.

Sure, by California's time the lecture was at 2am... it looks like I missed a handful of sleeping nights, but that evening I was really excited to see the latest Prejlocaj's show -which was great!

A ton of books

As we left San Francisco to and returned to Paris, we had to pack two years of our life into the maximal baggage allowed by Air France: two times 32 kilos per person.

That makes almost two hundred kilos (plus a few no-so-light hand-luggages :-) and it took a few attempts to make sure all of the packs were around 31 kilos.

Then came the arrival to our appartment in Paris. We had rented it while in the US, and left many of our things in the cellar -which happened to be a bad idea, as everything got impregnated with this peculiar smell of humid dust. As for the books, we had kept them in my stepfamily's home. We rented a small van to bring them home.

It took 80 cardboxes to get our books packed. I weighted a handful of typical cardboxes, and the average weight was 12 kilos. So the total is close to a ton!

Asynchronous blogging

True, for the last weeks I have been mostly been out of network connection ... this explaining the lack of updates.

But as these days have been quite dense in activities, I will blog a bit on them. OK I lost the synchronicity, but at least I will keep a time-ordered sequence! The threads should go as:

- the end of my RC term

- Tahoe-Yosemite-Sequoia Park

- Mexico bis

- Back to Paris

- Plans for the rentrée

From sun to fog

As planned, we went for camping last week-end. Wheather in the east bay was so different from San Francisco's! The thermometer was most often above 30 degrees (celsius), which is something I have not lived very often these last months: while at SLAC I spend most of my time in the BaBar control room, and here the temeprature is rather 21-22 degrees. And when I leave the city in the morning, or when I'm back, in the evening, it is most often the famous SF fog I see.

A strong contrast with the situation in Mount Diablo, where the sun was litteraly cooking us...

And this last sunday we went to the Stern Grove concert, featuring Khaled. A surprise guest was announced, it happened to be Carlos Santana, who entered onstage after a couple of songs. Less of a surprise was the fog, that came around 4pm...

Off-duty ...

Whew! This run coordination (RC) job is taking more than 100% of my time. This last month was quite tough. A new colleague just started his term this week, so I am off-duty for a few days. Most of the things I have been working on are related to operations/safety/data quality -- a lot to keep me busy.

This weekend  we plan to make something nice with my family, for the first time in a long time: some camping and reading included. And to catch up with everyone here at Quantum Diaries.

My term as Run coordinator ends in 1 month. The time has really flown by. After that I will come back to a 'normal' life, with different activities. This said, it is an amazing experience, I have learned many things on the detector side. Sure, it takes a lot of time and it is not a piece of cake, but it is a unique opportunity for an experimental physicist.

La défaite

Last saturday, I voted OUI for the European Constitution.

The OUI was defeated, by a large margin. Y'a pas eu photo.

French

It took a bit longer, mostly because I was too lazy to spend a morning in the consulate doing the paperwork. But I finally did it, and received my first (*) document as a french citizen.

I received the passport just in time, so that this saturday I will be performing my first vote as a french, in the referendum for the European constitutional treaty. Reading the polls, I fear this will just add to my already (too?) long list of electoral defeats...

(*) not quite accurate: after my application for citizenship was approved, I received a lettre de bienvenue from Chirac. But you don't cross borders with that piece of paper!

Outage

Since thursday 8am,  power at SLAC is down.

A tree fell on the principal power line, and as the secondary line was ongoing some maintainance (related to work on Santa Cruz Avenue), the blackout is total.

The backup systems worked for a few hours, until a set of power generators were installed here and there for the most critical needs. In the case of BaBar, this is limited to keeping one chiller on, and vacuum on the superconducting magnet. Plus 1 computer and some halogen lamps for the shifters!

We hope to confirm better news from PG&E this afternoon:have power restored today, and start the recovery plan tomorrow morning.

BaBar takes data

I know, it is no longer fresh news, but the fact is there: the B-factory is back to normal operations.

PeP-II delivered the first collisions two weeks ago, and BaBar started its Run 5 of data taking a few days after. As always after a long shutdown, things have been a bit stressful (we have been many people to spend loooong days, evenings and nights in the BaBar control room...) but now everything is going on a lot more smoothly.

The luminosities is increasing day after day, we plan to reach back last year's best performances quite soon, and then to outperform them. For those interested in numbers, the luminosity is now about 6*10^33 (cm^-2sec^-1), last year it peaked above 9.2*10^33. These numbers are public ,and can be monitored in real time here.

This week-end I am off-duty, so we are preparing for some camping time at Yosemite -hopefully the wheather will be nice to us :-)