Ok, now I have the same problem as my fellow bloggers: How to write the first blog entry when never done something like this before?
So I will just start with what I am doing right now: Currently I am sitting in my “summer office”, meaning that I am sitting in the outside area of the CERN canteen with a spectacular view on the Mont Blanc, laptop in front of me and working on the unanswered mails from the day. The choice of the office is not only driven by the nice weather and the nice view, but also by the fact that it is very crowded here and visitors as I don’t get easily an usable office. But I can actually work very efficiently here in the outside area in the shade.
My “real” office is at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. I am working on pixel detectors for future collider experiments at the sLHC and ILC. Two rather different environments for pixel detectors, but there are enough common issues to work on both.
One common field is testing the devices in a so-called test beam, provided for example at DESY and CERN. And that is where I come in. Within EUDET, a EU financed program for infrastructure for detector R&D, we build a pixel beam telescope, which defines the tracks of a test beam with a precision of 3 micrometer. With that information other detectors can be characterised very precisely. The telescope is usually located at the DESY test beam, but last week I transported it from Hamburg to Geneva. Here at the CERN test beam facility the telescope will be used by 10 different groups during the summer. Most of the groups will test semiconductor-tracking detectors, but there will be also be groups with larger devices.
The telescope is now installed and ready for the first beam tomorrow morning. I hope we did not forget anything … so stay tuned 😉
