Physicists here at CERN love acronyms! Some of them are complete tongue-twisters (try pronouncing MWRG!), others sound not awfully bad (like CRUZET or CRAFT). Learning these fast is a big challenge for newcomers 🙂
This not-so-great photo shows the path the protons follow before they collide at the very center of the CMS detector (which is just a couple of meters from where this photo was taken). In a few weeks, the so-called Beam Pipe will be placed here and radially outwards the CMS Silicon Tracker will take its rightful place as the CMS detector is preparing for the startup of the Large Hadron Collider.
Now, why do I write all this? Well, while sitting in a meeting I heard these three coming up in the discussion and felt a bit nostalgic. Last time I had heard them was in 2009 when we were again preparing for an LHC start up. Interesting times.
De-obfuscation:
MWRG : Mid-Week Global Run (preparatory test runs performed weekly as detectors are being commissioned)
CRUZET : Cosmic RUn at ZEro Tesla (full CMS-wide test run with the magnet off, without beam, but looking at particles offered to us for free by cosmic radiation)
CRAFT : Cosmic Run At Four Tesla (full CMS-wide test run with the magnet ON, again using cosmic radiation particles)
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