The Big Day: 10 September 2008

The goals for The Big Day (“TBD”) have been set:

• 2E9 protons circulating in Beam 2 (CCW)
• 2E9 protons circulating in Beam 1 (CW)

There will be 27 film crews from around the world descending on CERN—three per hour for nine hours! I am told that the parking lot outside of the CCC will be devoted to the satellite trucks for the film crews, so we have to find other parking.

At 9:30 am, the internal target/dump, TDI, will be removed from Point 8 (CCW, Beam 2) and beam will begin traveling around. There should be circulating beam shortly thereafter.

They want to have 450 GeV proton/proton collisions "soon" (maybe "days"). The goal will be to deliver proton/proton interactions to ATLAS and to CMS at a rate of 100 Hz (somewhat smaller rates to the other experiments, LHCb and ALICE). This will allow these experiments to do a real shake-down of their detectors.

It should be fun!