Monday, 22 August

8am: Yet another early morning after a late night. I am getting too old for this (some would disagree with the “getting”). The shifters this morning are the same as those from yesterday morning, who were unfortunate in that there was no beam throughout their shift. They were more fortunate today as the beam was on. But our data acquisition system was not in such good shape. In the middle of the night the system had stopped working. A Windows-based laptop that controls part of the system seemed to have spontaneously rebooted itself!

Thursday, 18 August

9am: We reconvened at the test-beam area. First thing on the agenda was a second visit from the safety service, who wanted to see if we could improve on the grounding of our system – to protect people from any possible chance of electrocution. The risk was already extremely low (and, in any case, people are not permitted near the equipment when it is running) but we still managed to improve things a bit.

This is a guest post by Sara Kamboj the American School of Paris, who spent a week in July 2015 interviewing scientists at CERN for a film project at school.

Guest post by Alexander Grohsjean

Born at the end of the ’70s, I was still in school when the heaviest of all quarks was discovered at the Tevatron: the top quark. Back then I had no idea what it was about. But reading an article in the newspaper I felt the excitement surrounding such a discovery. My interest for the smallest and most basic building blocks of the universe had been awakened. When I joined the CMS Collaboration in 2014, I had no doubt that the first measurement I would like to do was that of the production rates of top-quark pairs at the new energy regime of 13 TeV. Shortly after the restart of the LHC in summer this year, we began a journey where no-one has gone before.