Social and Associated Events

SLAC tours are offered in two separate groups during the Monday 12:35-2:30pm extended lunch hours. Sign up to the tours are included in the registration. Each group will have 80min of tour time with lunch staggered to be before and after the tour respectively. The tour bus will start boarding next to the Kavli building at 12:35pm for group 1 and 1:05pm for group 2. The visiting points:

• Klystron gallery alcove: showing an underground section of the linac and a view into the 2 mile long klystron gallery which is a "must see" for SLAC.
• Near and Far Experimental Halls of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the latest facility of high intensity X-ray laser for photon science.
• Collider Hall with the MK-II and SLD experiments at the SLAC Linear Collider which had e+e- operation at the Z0 peak during the LEP era.
• Research yard hill top lookout point for a view of the Linac, and the historical site of End Station A and SPEAR (now SSRL).

There is a separate opportunity of visiting the RCE/ATCA DAQ R&D lab including some demos of running ATLAS pixel calibration (may be also cosmic telescope) with pixel sensors using the current RCE system. The tentative window for this is Tuesday Nov/16 at 4pm (during parallel session time). To ensure your request being noted, interested parties are encouraged to E-mail Mike Huffer. If the Tuesday time doesn't work for you, you can negotiate with Mike directly for a time works for both of you.

A reception is currently planned for Monday Nov/15 6:30pm on SLAC site at the Panofsky auditorium breezeway and cafeteria dining area, with an extensive hot food menu and drinks.

An excursion is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday Nov/17 in the afternoon before the dinner cruise. This is currently envisaged to be a bus tour to San Francisco with two vista point stops before dropping off downtown for some free time:

• 1st stop at Twin Peaks for a view of San Francisco
• Drive over Golden Gate Bridge to the Parking Vista Point at the other (Sausalito) end of the bridge as a 2nd stop for the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay and the city.
• Back into San Francisco city to drop people off at two spots for some free time:
  • Maritime National Historic Park: near the start point of the Cable Car Powell-Hyde Line. It's right next to Ghirardelli Square (for connoisseurs of chocolate) and Hyde St Pier with some historical ships. You can walk from here to explore Fisherman's Wharf (Pier-39),North Beach,; or Taking Cable car to stop by the crooked Lombard street then onto China town, Union Square.
  • The Ferry Building: very close to the cruise starting point Pier-3. From here you can take an easy walk around the Embarcadero, light rail line F to Union Square for shopping, or Cable car California Line to China town.
  Everyone needs to navigate yourself to Pier-3 for the dinner cruise in the evening. Please give plenty time to ensure arrival at Pier-3 by the 6:30pm Hornblower boarding time. Most above spots are within 30min walk from Pier-3, but faster with cable car California Line or light rail line F. We would not recommend other farther touring spots such as Golden Gate Park as there may not be sufficient time to get back to the dinner cruise.

The two vista points are not the usual place you go without a car or during a compact short trip so that hopefully they will be a fresh experience for most people, may be even some locals. However, the viability depends on weather as Twin Peaks in particular only makes sense when it's not foggy. We may alter this preliminary plan still due to weather or lack of time to go to both vista points etc.

A dinner cruise on San Francisco Bay is planned for Wednesday, Nov 17, evening. Some info on the Hornblower dinner cruise can be found on the Hornblower website. Boarding time is 6:30pm at Pier-3. Because the boat is shared with other parties, it will not wait for late arrivals. For those driving themselves to the dinner cruise, please allow plenty of time for parking near Pier-3 (pdf) which can be tricky. If you want to park on Pier-3, you should mention you will be on Hornblower cruise to get the reduced parking fee of $10.

A double header SLAC experimental seminar pair are scheduled in conjunction with the workshop, both in the SLAC Kavli auditorium where our TDAQ meeting session will take place and fitting into the lunch hours:

• Nov/16 (Tues) 12:30-1:30pm: Fred Wickens (RAL)
  The ATLAS Data Acquisition and Trigger System: A Historic Overview
• Nov/18 (Thur) 12:30-1:30pm: Sridhara Dasu (Wisconsin)
  CMS Trigger and Data Acquisition

This is the usual seminar hours during lunch time and often people either take a quick lunch before or after (cafeteria lunch served 11:30am-2:00pm), or grab some lunch to eat during the seminar (considered normal practice and both speakers are familiar with that).

Tuesday Nov/16 4:00pm: For those not participating in the Tuesday parallel sessions, this may be a good time window to have a walk on Stanford campus and attending the Stanford physics collquium. This is not formally organized and is up to you to making your own way there. The colloquium speaker this week is Jeff Richman from UCSB/CMS: "Exploring the TeV Energy Scale at the Large Hadron Collider". This colloquium is at the Hewett Teaching Center on Stanford campus (see Stanford Physics Collquium page for location details) and refreshments starts at 4:00pm in the physics Department Varian building next door and colloquium starts at 4:15pm. Parking is free after 4pm so that driving there yourself is a good option. Or you can use use the free Marguerite shuttle SLAC line to get there. The shuttle stop for Hewett Teaching Center is "Gates".