Kamran Vaziri and Don Cossairt
On October 4, Fermi National Accelerator Lab (Fermilab) hadron collider set the world record for peak luminosity at 141E30/cm2/s at 1960 GeV. The previous record of 140E30/cm2/s at 62 GeV was achieved 23 years ago by the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) proton-proton collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Next, Tevatron went on breaking its own record several times in October, and finally on November 10, achieved its highest record of 166.8E30/cm2/s. Two weeks before the first record, due to this summer's draught (half the normal annual rainfall), the cooling water available from the on-site ponds and wells and offsite was low enough to bring the Lab's accelerators to the brink of shutdown. However, the recent rainfall brought some of the wells on-site into production so that they, together with the water we pump to keep the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) Project and Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) Project dry and with the make-up water from the Fox River, will enabled us to continue.
October was also the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab. But the 10-year anniversary celebration goes beyond the experimental collaborations. Posters will depict the involvement of groups throughout the laboratory, from Business Services to the Accelerator Division. Of course, the ES&H Section has contributed from the ground up: from the design of the shielding and incorporation of other radiological aspects into the design of accelerators and the detectors. Direct contributions by the Radiation Physics Group such as the design of the beam loss monitors and the personal oxygen monitors are also displayed.
The NuMI remote handling and shielded work/repair cell was used again during the last few months to figure out and repair a ground-fault problem with the highly activated NuMI horn. The maximum absorbed dose rate measured with a Teletector was 50 rad/hr but the work was performed in a radiation field of a few mrem/hr. On December 6, 2005, the MINOS experiment reached a milestone of 1E20 protons delivered on target. This is a new record in long baseline accelerator experiments. The number of events should be large enough to do world-class analysis of oscillation parameters.