I think Dr. P isn’t great at explaining what he wants and how he sees things.
I’ve been working on one of the levels of the trigger system for this experiment. (The trigger system is meant to cut down on the millions of events that occur per second, so that a reasonable number can be analyzed and stored.) In particular, I’m working on an algorithm that could identify “good” signal events by counting the number of tracks.
Anyway, thanks to Dr. P’s poor explanations, I spent a good portion of the last few weeks thinking all the work I’ve done thus far was useless because they’d already decided on what they wanted for the trigger system.
This understandably killed my motivation, which is part of the reason I decided I didn’t want to do particle physics.
But it turns out Dr. Rubin just didn’t explain it well, and they haven’t actually decided on what they want for the trigger. So my algorithm could be used... if I can prove that it works in the next two weeks.
Except my motivation’s still dead, and it’s hard to focus on work when I mostly just want to go home. Whoops.
Some of my friends and I rented a car and drove down to Bern. It’s absolutely beautiful--just as much as I remember it being. Didn’t get to see any bears, but helped one of the other summer students in my group pick a proposal spot (the Rose Garden on top of a massively steep hill overlooking the entire city). Got to go inside Einstein’s apartment, where he developed his ideas about light as a particle. There’s a river that runs around most of the city, so we jumped off a bridge and floated down it.
Then we drove to Interlaken, which was... wow. It’s beautiful. It’s so, so beautiful. It’s near this clear blue lake surrounded by these amazing mountains... God, it was fantastic. Had a nice fancy dinner there, then drove back to Geneva.
The next day, made some last-minute plans to go bouldering at the Saleve (the Pre-Alp near Geneva)... then got lost and ended up hiking up the entire mountain. We somehow ended up taking a probably-illegal and definitely-very-dangerous trail. (Halfway up, I realized that there was a possibility that we might actually die, or at least get stuck on the mountain, and in the face of my own mortality I freaked out and used a massive amount of data to get GPS coordinates and send them to someone.) After 5 hours of constant toil (we were also carrying backpacks and a crash pad, we made it to the top of the mountain, took the cable car down...
And then said “screw it” and decided to just boulder again at Bains des Paquis (the bouldering structure at the lake).
I know what I’m doing this year, so at least the learning curve has been virtually nonexistent.
But I’m also less than enthusiastic about this project, particularly about the fact that it doesn’t seem like it’ll actually have any impact on the experiment. And my advisor (I’m only working with Dr. P this summer, no more intimidating Dr. G) also doesn’t seem to understand how the code works.
Right now I’m just running my code (which I wrote in a couple of weeks and is already bigger than anything I wrote last summer) and plugging numbers into spreadsheets.
Skipped Lake Parade this year to do some climbing in Léaz, France! It was my first time leading outdoors, and it was literally the greatest. Took a couple of falls, including a major whipper (whacked my head a little bit), but that view was so worth it.
I’m quickly realizing that I probably won’t have as much time to post as last year. The group of interns in my program is much more social this year, so between lectures/work/socializing/exercising (yes, I do that now)/errands, I barely have time to sleep.
A typical weekday:
wake up at 7:30am
work out, shower, eat an apple for breakfast
go to lectures at 9am (I understand a lot more than I did last year, even from the theory lectures, so that’s good)
eat lunch (usually bread/cheese or a salad or leftovers)
go to work
leave work at 5:30pm and do something (usually go down to the lake)
get dinner at some point (usually pasta or eating out or something equally unhealthy)
get back at around 10pm, do laundry/homework (one of the lecturers assigns problem sets)
fart around on the internet until I realize it’s like 1am and i’m only going to be able to get 6ish hours of sleep
So yeah, I’m pretty exhausted. I definitely need some down time. I’m also not being as productive as I think I should be at work... I should probably get more sleep.
Weekend stuff is under a cut for length, if anyone’s interested.
Prague was awesome. I had to bike to the airport at 4am, which was less than fun, but I got to see some friends there. Definitely a lot of walking, but the city was beautiful in a brooding sort of way. We ate a lot of food (especially after we realized that grocery stores were significantly cheaper), and I went shopping (mostly for the excuse to say I went shopping in Prague).
This weekend, I’m probably just going to chill here in Geneva. Lake Festival is Saturday, and I might go out with some friends. I might visit Bern or something, too. Anything more strenuous is off the table, because it’s freaking hot right now--up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend.
Too many things to post right now but: First week back in Geneva was great! I really like the other summer students in my group this year, and I've done a lot of socializing. We've been down to the lake a few times (went climbing again!) and I've gotten to bike around CERN. Work is going less great--got introduced as "the female one" during our first weekly group meeting, and it feels like my project isn't having any useful impact. On the plus side, Dr. P is helping introduce me to potential grad program advisers in particle physics, and he's talking up my abilities a lot. Maybe a bit too much... Also I'm currently boarding a plane to Prague...
If you’re still following this blog, props. It’s been a long year, but I’m back in Virginia for orientation week--then next week is back to CERN for summer nombre deux!
So far, everything’s going well. Some of the students from last year are still in the area, and I’m hanging out with them a few times this week. The group this year is much bigger and more social. I’ve spent the last few days with them playing cards, grocery shopping, and going to the movies--when we’re not listening to Dr. P or working on computer stuff.
As far as science goes, the lectures are pretty much exact repeats of what I heard last year. Although now I can ask semi-intelligent questions, which is good. I’ve pretty much picked up my research right where I left off.
Dr. P also said some very nice things about my intelligence and work ethic yesterday, and that I’ve proven that I can work at the level of a grad student. I’m flattered and a little relieved (this means good rec letters for grad school!).
I'm back! At least temporarily, because a few CERN things are happening to me all at once.
I have confirmed my spot at CERN again this coming summer! So starting this June, this blog will officially go off hiatus (so I can whine about research and other things).
I've also gotten a list of the other students in my group. I'm the only returning student, so I guess I'm the new group mother. (In case anyone's wondering, Katelyn, my old roommate and the former group mother, had her fairytale wedding and is now moving on to Real Adult Life.)
My advisor (Dr. P) is finally helping me get started on a new project. My CERN computer account has been reactivated, so this will be my research project over the semester, and I'll keep working on it during the summer.
I'm attempting to read a particle physics textbook so that I won't be totally lost during some of the lectures...
He said he's proud of how much I've accomplished, and that my other (judgy Italian) advisor also had good things to say.
He said they're both very impressed with how I don't ask for a lot of help--they give me a problem, and I work at it until I solve it. He said that's unusual even among grad students.
It was... nice. I've always wondered if maybe I don't have the right mindset for research. If maybe I don't ask enough questions or think deeply enough about things. But this is validation, in a way--that at the very least, I'm stubborn enough to do research.
We finished labeling the cables (clabeling?) yesterday. Which was probably good, because my passive-aggressiveness levels were starting to climb. (Labeling cables is really, terribly, awfully boring.)
Katelyn and I ended up not having to present at the weekly group meeting, because Dr. P apparently forgot about it (his wife and daughter are in town, so he's been skipping out on work lately).
I finished drafting my technical note (basically a summary of what I've been working on this summer), and Dr. G (judgy Italian advisor) wrote "great work" (!!!)
...and then gave me a bunch of things to change.
We're just chilling in the office now. We have to return our keys, access cards, and dosimeters today, which is actually kind of depressing. I like my dosimeter--it told me the other day that I've received no significant amounts of radiation since starting work here, which was sweet. And I like my access card, too. I'll get new ones next year, but I'm sort of weirdly emotionally attached to these ones.
Anyway, I guess I'll wrap up with another post about how NA62 works later today. And then I'll go with the other interns to get gelato to drown my sad feelings about leaving.
So today, Katelyn and I get to work on more hardware stuff. We did some stuff last week, too, and we got to go down into the actual experimental cavern for the first time. It was super exciting.
(Or well, seeing the experiment was exciting. The actual work we were doing was mostly boring... we were testing the cabling of the boards which are used to digitize the trigger signal from the liquid krypton calorimeter. It sounds cool, but we were just touching oscillator differential probes to ethernet cables. We were literally touching tips with cables. Over 200 cables. And today we're labeling even more cables. Hardware work is mind-numbing, and also a lot of cables.)
Anyway now I'm going to talk a lot about the NA62 experiment, sorry dudes, science below the cut.
Okay, so here's how it works.
Some protons from the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron--it's the accelerator that feeds into the LHC) get shunted into a beamline that serves the North Area, where the NA62 experiment is located. (Hence the "NA", which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.)
After being directed by magnets, this beam of protons ends up hitting a target:
(This is where the target will eventually be located. It's not set up yet, which is the only reason we were able to get so close--see the "Radiation" sign?)
Some of the protons interact with the target and produce kaons, the particles we're trying to study. A few detectors, called the CEDAR (or K-tag) and the GigaTracker (GTK) spectrometers, are supposed to be able to ID these kaons and measure their momenta:
(Yeah, the GTK modules aren't actually there yet either, but at least someone labeled where they're supposed to go.)
Then the kaons go through a decay region, where they presumably decay. Hopefully into a single pion (and two neutrinos), since this is the ultra-rare signal we want to measure, but they also decay into a lot of other things. So 12 Large Angle Veto modules are interspersed throughout the decay region to help cut down on some of that background noise. The STRAW spectrometer is also there somewhere, to help track particles more precisely.
(The gray thing is the STRAW, and the white thing is one of the Large Angle Veto modules--which, let me tell you, were a pain in the butt to include in my code.)
Somewhere in there is also a giant-ass magnet (ass-magnet, lol) that deflects any charged particles at an angle. (The momentum kick given by the magnet was also a pain in the ass when it came to coding.)
(Truly, it is a giant-ass magnet.)
Anyway, after that comes all the good stuff (personal opinion), but this post is getting stupidly long so I'll save it for the next one.
Cherenkov radiation - faster than light in a meduim.
Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (in this case the electron) passes through an electrically polarizable medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium - in cherenkov radiation, electrons are emitted faster than than the speed light travels in water.
light travels through water at 0.75c (thats 75% the speed of light in a vacuum). Matter can be accelerated beyond this speed during nuclear reactions and in particle accelerators.
Cherenkov radiation is used in particle physics to identify types of particles. One could measure the velocity of an electrically charged elementary particle by the properties of the Cherenkov light it emits in a certain medium. If the momentum of the particle is measured independently, the mass of the particle can be computed by its momentum and velocity, and with this identify the particle.
The radiant blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor is due to Cherenkov radiation. It is named after the Soviet scientist and Nobel Prize winner Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, who discovered it in 1958 through experiment.
i decided to keep working on this project during the school year
i kind of hate myself right now, because i know i'm going to regret this later, but also it's CERN and i can't help myself, and anyway it's really just a part-time job, and school comes first and all
Out of the GMU group, Daniel is my usual partner on weekend adventures. (Katelyn and Ryan are usually out of the country, traveling to... wherever they go.)
Since this weekend was our last here in Geneva, we had a few things left on our bucket list. He wanted to hike up into the Jura mountains, and I wanted to bike around the LHC ring. The biking did happen, but the weather forecast for the rest of the weekend was gray and rainy, so we decided to skip the hiking on Saturday and go downtown instead. (And then of course Saturday turned out to be a gorgeous day, but whatever.)
We went to the flea market in Plainpalais, one of the districts in the city. It... was pretty much like any other flea market, except with more Swiss-specific stuff. I bought a few trinkets and posed with random American souvenirs.
Then we headed over to the Natural History Museum in Geneva. It was... also pretty much like every other natural history museum I've been to--Raleigh's Museum of Natural Sciences might actually be better--but it was nice to walk around and learn stuff about not-physics. I was hungry by the time we were done at the museum, so we wandered down to the lake where the Fêtes de Génève vendors were, and I spent an exorbitant amount of money on spring rolls and gummies.
In the evening, we caught a tram with some of the students from UMichigan and headed back down to the lake area to watch the fireworks show.
Which, okay, is definitely worth seeing if you're ever in the area. It wasn't quite a life-changing epiphany, but on a scale of 1 to mind-blowing, it was definitely at least a 9.5. Having seen the National Mall fireworks on the Fourth of July, I can definitively say that Switzerland just one-up'd the US. It was like what Weasley's Wizard Wheezes fireworks would look like, except choreographed to music.
The tram ride after was awful and crowded and smelly, because everyone was trying to get out of downtown, but it was worth it.
