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Muon
Tracker
Raphael Granier de Cassagnac
Today,
the 12th of April 2006, I attend a meeting in the morning.
It is about a silicon vertex detector upgrade that we are
planning to add to the PHENIX heavy ion experiment in two
years from now. In the afternoon and in the evening, I stay
in the PHENIX control room.
This year, protons are collided in the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider
accelerator, and our experiment is actually taking data.
For two weeks, I'm the expert on duty for
the operation of the muon trackers, a large detector for which
my lab built some electronics. Playing the expert means that
I carry a beeper and can be called by the shift crew anytime.
During the early afternoon, I check that the detector is working
properly. It is, and I report this at the daily operation
meeting. Then, since the collider is not providing beam to
us in the late afternoon, I peacefully continue a data
analysis I'm currently working on. It is about data
we took two years ago and we are currently finalizing the
results to write a paper.
Indeed, I’ve been looking to extract the collision impact
parameter from our simulation program for a few days and I
get my first numbers just before dinner. I’ll cross-check
them later tonight, or maybe tomorrow.
This, is a busy day! Partly because I’m currently staying
close to my experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
(New-York, USA), while I spend most of my time in my lab,
at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, France). I’ve been working
like this for five years now.
At Brookhaven, our goal is to create and study the quark
gluon plasma and I’m currently looking into one
specific signature of it, namely the modification of certain
particle (called charmonia) production yields. We have shown
preliminary results on this subject last summer and are finalizing
them now.
We also need to upgrade our detector to measure new things
with greater precision (open charm). That’s why I can be preparing
future detector, take present collisions
and analyze past data at the same time.
Indeed, I’ve always wanted to work at some boundary of our
current knowledge. My specific interest for particle
physics was triggered during high school, when I
accidentally fall on an article about CERN, the large European
accelerator complex in Geneva, measuring that there were only
three types of neutrinos, without actually seeing them. It
sounded exciting.
Since then, I slowly oriented my studies towards this direction,
always keeping in mind that there were so many interesting
things to do, that it was not a problem if I don’t succeed
or if I get bored by the subject. So far, it didn’t happen,
and I’m happy to continue in this direction.
PHENIX control room is web-casted: http://runcontrol.phenix.bnl.gov/~haggerty/pcam/pcam.phtml?pcam=pcam0
My work webpage is here:
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~raphael/
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