Heavy-ion researchers seize their moment

During the short heavy-ion run at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, every moment counts. When physicist Marta Verweij arrived at CERN in early November, one of the first things she did was pull an all-nighter in the control center for the CMS experiment. "We didn't get to sleep until 2 p.m. the following day," she says. Verweij and her colleagues were trouble-shooting an issue with the CMS trigger system, which was letting too much data through and flooding their computing farm. "Once we identi...