September 20, 2021
With international travel restrictions still in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers in the Wright Lab Relativistic Heavy Ion Group (RHIG) applied for and received permission for Yale University to become an official remote site for data taking for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and a new Remote Operations Site (ROS) is now installed and operational in Wright Lab West.
The LHC restarted operations in May 2021, in a data-taking run called “Run-3,” and therefore ALICE data-taking shifts for the RHIG group and other ALICE collaborators have also restarted. Early shift work at ALICE includes collecting data to continue the commissioning of the recently installed upgraded readout chambers of the Time Projection Chamber (TPC ). RHIG members played a key role in construction and testing of the inner readout chambers.
So far Yale/ALICE group members Laura Havener, Mike Sas, Caitie Beattie and Hannah Bossi have sat shifts via the ROS. The whole ALICE group is eager to begin analyzing the data collected in Run-3 .