Q2 in the New World
October 11, 2016
France and the French have been involved in this local area for a number of years. In 1781, the French Army, led by Compte de Rochambeau, helped the Continental Army of George Washington defeat the British in the Siege of/Battle of Yorktown. While my sentiments with respect to that event are mixed, I have no such equivocation with respect to Thursday’s event.
In the design for the 12 GeV Upgrade, there are many magnets. In Hall B, there is a Torus and a Solenoid. There is a large solenoid in Hall D, which has had several previous lives. In Hall C, a “small” septum dipole, the Q1 “medium sized” quadrupole, the Q2 and Q3 large quadrupoles and a large Dipole constitute the magnets of the new Super High Momentum Spectrometer, which will join its 6 GeV partner, the High Momentum Spectrometer (HMS). So, there are eight magnets, all superconducting, in the upgrade physics scope. Hall C’s Q2 and Q3 are very similar, almost identical in construction, but with that exception, each of the magnets is unique.
The Q2 and Q3 magnets were combined into a single bid package. The contract for Q2-Q3 and the large Dipole were awarded to a company called Sigmaphi in Vannes, a very pretty little town on the Brittany coast of the French hexagon. This is certainly part of the Old World, and, with the name of the president of the company being Jean-Luc Lancelot, one is tempted to think of King Arthur of the Round Table and his Queen Guinevere.
But romance is far from the business model of Sigmaphi, and given a chance, Jean-Luc will extol the solid virtues of his workforce, which is dominated by inhabitants of the local Morbihan Department. Over the time it has taken to build the magnets, a number of us have gotten to know the Sigmaphi team including David Raumage, and his technicians on the floor.
For several years, there have been weekly phone calls between us and the Sigmaphi team held by Hall C 12 GeV Upgrade Leader Howard Fenker and Procurement’s Kathleen Jones and Mitch Laney and often Claus Rode on this end, with the Sigmaphi team lead engineer Frederick Forest and Engineer Amaury Porheil on the other.
Visits to France from our representatives have also been a regular occurrence, chiefly by Hall C Engineers Paul Brindza, Steve Lassiter and Eric Sun. Several others have been often enough to get to know the several restaurants in the town and by the port, including Chase Dubbe, Ruben Fair, Leigh Harwood, Bruce Lenzer and Glenn Young. The Hotel Escale Oceania has done pretty well as a result of all of these Virginian visitors!
But all good things come to an end, and the end is truly in sight. The first of the magnets, Q2, left Vannes a few weeks ago. I had the good fortune to then visit Vannes, joining Howard as Jean-Luc conducted an all-hands ceremony to watch the Dipole leave. Now, all that is left is Q3, and it is in the final welding of the outer vessel and will follow within a month or so.
So, how will they get to America? When asked that question, Ringo Starr famously replied, “We go to Greenland and turn left.” If life were so simple!
Here’s what transpired for the Q2: First, you get permission for the twelve geopolitical departments in France to transport “un convoi exceptionnel” to the Belgian border on the way to the port of Antwerp. Next stop: Liverpool, England, then, following the path of the Titanic, Halifax, Nova Scotia. There was a pause for a few days before progress to New York followed. Continuing south, the ship transporting the Q2, the Atlantic Sail, entered the Chesapeake Bay and….. turned north to Baltimore. Retracing its steps, it finally arrived in Norfolk on Tuesday, Oct. 4. The plan was for Q2 to complete the trip on a wide- but also very low-load trailer, so as to negotiate a few underpasses, and to come across the James River Bridge on Wednesday. Unfortunately, a small typographical error invalidated the necessary permit, and the trip was delayed a day. It would have been delayed another day had Mitch Laney not interceded with the Va. Dept. of Motor Vehicles for Lockwood Brothers to clear the permit.
On Thursday, Paul Brindza tracked the magnet with one of the web cams on the bridge and in the mid-afternoon, Allison Lung saw it passing her office window. The magnet transport frame was placed on an even lower set of rollers to go down the truck ramp into Hall C, and truly Egyptian-style techniques were employed to literally slide the magnet with its cryo-can under the lintel and into the waiting arms of Sigmaphi’s Vincent Sigalo and Hall C’s Steve Lassiter, Walter Kellner and the Hall C techs.
At 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 6, 2016, Q2 is in Hall C at Jefferson Lab in the New World.