Now that operations have been resumed at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider – LHC, researchers from the Institute of Space Science (ISS) are running data quality monitoring shifts at the ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), one of the seven LHC experiments at CERN (The European Organisation for Nuclear Research).
The five physicists from the Institute of Space Science who will be present in the ALICE control room at CERN during May-November 2015 are: Andrea Danu, Ciprian Mitu, Cătălin Ristea, Adrian Sevcenco and Ionel Stan.
CERN teams are working during 8-hour-long shifts, supervised by a Shift Leader (SL) who is in charge of implementing the shift plan defined in the run coordination meetings and of directing shift operations.
The ISS researchers will be responsible for the important task of monitoring the quality of the incoming data (Data Quality Monitoring Shift – DQM) flowing into the ALICE permanent storage. The monitoring process consists in checking a series of histograms characteristic to each detection system, histrograms which are updated in real time. If potential anomalies in the raw data are observed, the person in charge has to take immediate optimal action, informing the SL and the detector experts. ISS researchers will also be in charge of monitoring the response from the OFFLINE system which treats critical information for the data reconstruction.
During all this time, the Institute of Space Science will keep you updated on what is happening inside the ALICE experiment control room through short news and photos from CERN, from each shift where ISS researchers participate. Follow the updates on the dedicated web page and on the ISS Facebook page.