CERN Accelerating science

ALICE Run Manager (30 Sep - 13 Oct): Silvia Pisano
Silvia is a Physicist from Frascati. She worked in the field of hadronic physics at Jefferson Lab, and, in 2016, joined the ALICE Collaboration. Presently, she is the Coordinator of the Nuclear Physics group at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (INFN). She has a long experience in data taking operations, having taken DCS and DQM shifts in Run 2, and several Shift Leader and Run Manager mandates in Run 3. Silvia is also our Training Coordinator, working in close collaboration with the various central System Run Coordinators (SRCs) for the training of our shifters. She is also training and mentoring the Shift Leaders and Run Managers.

Silvia already covered a one-week RM mandate earlier this year, and she is now coming back for a second two-weeks period. She will coordinate the last two weeks of p-p physics data taking and the final preparations for the Heavy Ion run.

• LHC:
  After a quite productive weekend, with 55% of time spent in stable beams, the LHC suffered a quite prolonged stop due to a broken cold compressor in P8 that required a replacement. The incident was the consequence of the reactivation of the harmonic filter in P8 on Monday morning, resulting in an hard landing and damage of the rotating parts. The replacement of the cold compressor happened on Tuesday morning, and required a partial warm up of the QURC (part of the cryogenic distribution) during the night. The system was operational again around 5pm, and cool down of sectors 78 and 81 resumed. Beam operations were finally resumed on Wednesday evening, however with several hiccups. The first fill was dumped by a magnet cooling water issue, followed by an issue on a DFB current lead heater, both requiring an access. Beams were then resumed on Thursday morning, however the fills during the day were all prematurely dumped due to various issues, until the start of the MD4 block in the night between Thursday and Friday.
  
  The MD4 block will continue until next Tuesday, when the experimental caverns and LHC tunnels will be opened for the VIP visits linked to CERN’s 70th anniversary celebrations. Physics production is expected to resume on Tuesday afternoon/evening.
   
• P2 operations:
  ALICE has collected good data during the available fills. The PHOS detector has been successfully re-included in the data taking on Sunday, and has taken good data since then. During the MD4 period ALICE will remain super-safe and will run some tests of the central systems in preparation for the heavy ion data taking. Next Monday we plan to perform one last periodic update of the central systems software, after which the code will be frozen and additional updates will be limited as much as possible. On Tuesday we will invert once more the polarity of the magnets, with the goal of reaching a good balance of statistics between the two magnets configurations at the end of the p-p production period.
  We will then start the last period of p-p physics data taking, until the start of MD5 on 17 October.