Earthquake
This is a plot I made at work this morning. It shows the pitch and roll positions of certain magnets in the Tevatron during the time period around last night's 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan.
Now, remember. The Tevatron is a 4-mile circumference synchrotron located 25 feet underground in Batavia, Illinois. It consists of stainless steel beampipe surrounded by an elaborate system of superconducting magnets, devices to maintain vacuum, cooling supplies, detectors of all types, and so on. Each of the (elecro)magnets is made of many, many tons of solid steel and iron, with the superconducting wires cooled to the temperature of about 4 degrees K (that's four degrees above absolute zero), positioned very, very precisely to accomplish the goal of keeping billions and billions of tiny subatomic particles in the place we want them to be, within fractions of a millimeter. [By the way, each particle is, at full power, moving at 99.999954% of the speed of light. My quick and dirty calculation puts this at only about 300 miles/hour less than the speed of light. Crazy stuff, right?]
Anyway, the point I'm making is that these magnets are very big and heavy, very far away from Japan, and must be positioned extremely precisely. And yet, they felt the quake. What I plotted here were the pitch and roll measurements of several quadrupole magnets (which you can see here: they're the little yellow guys). You can see how they were pretty still until about 15 minutes after midnight CST (the USGS put the quake as happening at 11:46:23 PM (CST), so it took about half an hour to reach us), when they started rumbling; the bulk of the activity hit us half an hour later, and took an hour and a half more to subside.
Of course, we did not feel anything on the surface. We only found out about this through news sources, like everyone else. But the nature of the measurements we were able to make here are so very precise that we were able to see the minute effects of something that happened on the other side of the world. And they weren't so minute, either. Fortunately, we were still undergoing a brief period of shutdown for maintenance purposes at the time. My crew chief says that if we'd been running beam at the time--as we normally do, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year--we definitely would have quenched.
It's so much fun that I have this ability to control and examine an enormous repository of data. "On the Illinois prairie, beneath the bison, the frontier of science..." It makes my nerd sensors tingle in delight. It makes my teeth whiter, my eyes brighter, my hair have more body. This isn't the first earthquake the TeV has detected, either--there are similar plots for Haiti, Chile, Sumatra and so on in the electronic logbooks. It's humbling to think how interconnected we really are.
And it's humbling to think how this sort of disaster has affected lives in a much more direct fashion, and how it could have happened anywhere. I'll be thinking about the Japanese. I hope they're doing all right.
Now, remember. The Tevatron is a 4-mile circumference synchrotron located 25 feet underground in Batavia, Illinois. It consists of stainless steel beampipe surrounded by an elaborate system of superconducting magnets, devices to maintain vacuum, cooling supplies, detectors of all types, and so on. Each of the (elecro)magnets is made of many, many tons of solid steel and iron, with the superconducting wires cooled to the temperature of about 4 degrees K (that's four degrees above absolute zero), positioned very, very precisely to accomplish the goal of keeping billions and billions of tiny subatomic particles in the place we want them to be, within fractions of a millimeter. [By the way, each particle is, at full power, moving at 99.999954% of the speed of light. My quick and dirty calculation puts this at only about 300 miles/hour less than the speed of light. Crazy stuff, right?]
Anyway, the point I'm making is that these magnets are very big and heavy, very far away from Japan, and must be positioned extremely precisely. And yet, they felt the quake. What I plotted here were the pitch and roll measurements of several quadrupole magnets (which you can see here: they're the little yellow guys). You can see how they were pretty still until about 15 minutes after midnight CST (the USGS put the quake as happening at 11:46:23 PM (CST), so it took about half an hour to reach us), when they started rumbling; the bulk of the activity hit us half an hour later, and took an hour and a half more to subside.
Of course, we did not feel anything on the surface. We only found out about this through news sources, like everyone else. But the nature of the measurements we were able to make here are so very precise that we were able to see the minute effects of something that happened on the other side of the world. And they weren't so minute, either. Fortunately, we were still undergoing a brief period of shutdown for maintenance purposes at the time. My crew chief says that if we'd been running beam at the time--as we normally do, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year--we definitely would have quenched.
It's so much fun that I have this ability to control and examine an enormous repository of data. "On the Illinois prairie, beneath the bison, the frontier of science..." It makes my nerd sensors tingle in delight. It makes my teeth whiter, my eyes brighter, my hair have more body. This isn't the first earthquake the TeV has detected, either--there are similar plots for Haiti, Chile, Sumatra and so on in the electronic logbooks. It's humbling to think how interconnected we really are.
And it's humbling to think how this sort of disaster has affected lives in a much more direct fashion, and how it could have happened anywhere. I'll be thinking about the Japanese. I hope they're doing all right.