Summary of the LHC Controls and Operations Forum held at CERN on 1-2 December 1999

The LHC Controls-Operations Forum in December attempted to identify the challenges of running the LHC and the implications for controls and equipment. An outline of the forum, its objectives, summaries of the various sessions, conclusions and some recommendations are presented. It is anticipated that this information will act as input into current and future development

The Protection System for the Superconducting Elements of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The protection system for the superconducting elements of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [1] at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), and its associated equipment are presented: quench detectors, cold diodes, quench heaters and related power supplies, extraction resistors and associated current breakers. Features such as radiation resistance, redundancy and required reliability are discussed

Update of the LHC Arc Cryostat Systems Layouts and Integration

Since the LHC Conceptual Design report's publication in October 1995 [1], and subsequent evolutions [2], the LHC Arc Cryostat System has undergone recently a number of significant changes, dictated by the natural evolution of the project. Most noteworthy are the recent decisions to route the large number of auxiliary circuits feeding the arc corrector magnets in a separate tube placed inside the cryostat with connections to the magnets every half-cell. Further decisions concern simplification of the baseline vacuum and cryogenic sectorization, the finalization of the design of the arc cryogenic modules and the layout of the arc electrical distribution feedboxes. The most recent features of the highly intricate cryogenics, magnetic, vacuum and electrical distribution systems of the LHC are presente

Dynamic Effects and their Control at the LHC

Tune, chromaticity and orbit of the LHC beams have to be precisely controlled by synchronising the magnetic field of quadrupole, sextupole and corrector magnets.This is a challenging task for an accelerator using superconducting magnets, whose field and field errors will have large dynamic effects.The accelerator physics requirements are tight due to the limited dynamic aperture and the large energy stored in the beams.The power converters need to be programmed in order to generate the magnetic functions with defined tolerances. During the injection process and the energy ramp the magnetic performance cannot be predicted with sufficient accuracy, and therefore real-time feedback systems based on magnetic measurements and beam observations are proposed. Beam measurements are used to determine a correction factor for some of the power converters. From magnetic measurements the excitation of small magnets to compensate the sextupolar (b3) and decapolar (b5) field components in the dipole magnets will be derived. To meet these requirements a deterministic control system is envisaged

The LHC Prototype Full-Cell: Design Study

As a continuation of the experimental program carried-out with String 1, project management decided toward the end of 1995 to construct an LHC prototype Full-Cell, also known as String 2. The present document reports on the outcome of the one-year design effort by the community of specialists contributing to the LHC Prototype Full-Cell: it informs specialists on the boundary areas with other syste ms and conveys to the general public a description of the facility

Flexibility of a Eukaryotic Lipidome – Insights from Yeast Lipidomics

Mass spectrometry-based shotgun lipidomics has enabled the quantitative and comprehensive assessment of cellular lipid compositions. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has proven to be a particularly valuable experimental system for studying lipid-related cellular processes. Here, by applying our shotgun lipidomics platform, we investigated the influence of a variety of commonly used growth conditions on the yeast lipidome, including glycerophospholipids, triglycerides, ergosterol as well as complex sphingolipids. This extensive dataset allowed for a quantitative description of the intrinsic flexibility of a eukaryotic lipidome, thereby providing new insights into the adjustments of lipid biosynthetic pathways. In addition, we established a baseline for future lipidomic experiments in yeast. Finally, flexibility of lipidomic features is proposed as a new parameter for the description of the physiological state of an organism

Learning the Optimal Control of Coordinated Eye and Head Movements

Various optimality principles have been proposed to explain the characteristics of coordinated eye and head movements during visual orienting behavior. At the same time, researchers have suggested several neural models to underly the generation of saccades, but these do not include online learning as a mechanism of optimization. Here, we suggest an open-loop neural controller with a local adaptation mechanism that minimizes a proposed cost function. Simulations show that the characteristics of coordinated eye and head movements generated by this model match the experimental data in many aspects, including the relationship between amplitude, duration and peak velocity in head-restrained and the relative contribution of eye and head to the total gaze shift in head-free conditions. Our model is a first step towards bringing together an optimality principle and an incremental local learning mechanism into a unified control scheme for coordinated eye and head movements

Tackling child poverty in South Africa: Implications of ubuntu for the system of social grants

In the South African context both liberal and – in the form of the southern African idea of ubuntu – more communitarian and relational discourses of citizenship can be seen. The policy framework to tackle child policy, however, is dominated by the framework of liberal citizenship, most clearly through the Bill of and the various social grants. Using analyses from an original microsimulation model developed by one of the authors the paper shows however how a neglect of children’s relationships and inter-connectedness with their adult parents/carers in the current liberal citizenship inspired policy approach limits the effectiveness of this child poverty strategy. The empirical analyses demonstrate how a greater recognition in policy of the relational principles of ubuntu through more fully addressing the needs of children’s parents/carers via the creation of a comprehensive social security grant for working age adults is needed to effectively reduce child poverty as well as working age poverty

Eye tracking: empirical foundations for a minimal reporting guideline

In this paper, we present a review of how the various aspects of any study using an eye tracker (such as the instrument, methodology, environment, participant, etc.) affect the quality of the recorded eye-tracking data and the obtained eye-movement and gaze measures. We take this review to represent the empirical foundation for reporting guidelines of any study involving an eye tracker. We compare this empirical foundation to five existing reporting guidelines and to a database of 207 published eye-tracking studies. We find that reporting guidelines vary substantially and do not match with actual reporting practices. We end by deriving a minimal, flexible reporting guideline based on empirical research (Section "empirically based minimal reporting guideline")