Members of the CALICE AHCAL group at a beach on the banks of the river Elbe in Hamburg. You can see the container terminal of Hamburg harbor in the distance.
I guess this is becoming a habit: Again, I’m in a Lufthansa Airport Lounge, this time in Hamburg. I’m returning from a two day meeting of the Analog Hadron Calorimeter group within the CALICE collaboration at DESY. Actually, it was not just any meeting: We also had the end of data taking for our detector prototype to celebrate. Our detector took its final data set at Fermilab, where I had a lot of fun on shifts, in late May this year.
To take advantage of the epic weather in Hamburg, and to celebrate our end of run, instead of the usual dinner in the DESY Bistro we went to a beach on the banks of the river Elbe opposite the container terminal of the Hamburg harbor, for snacks and beers. A really fun event! Of course, particle physicists never really stop thinking about physics, so some of us started actually “designing” a first ILC detector in the sand.
The first operating ILC detector: Final focusing provided by a beer bottle, calorimetry with paper plates... and there even are particles!
The calorimeters are paper plates for sausages, the final focusing for the beam is provided by a beer bottle. And, there are even some particles: A high momentum muon, something that could even be a jet, a low-energy particle curling in the magnetic field, and a neutral particle decaying into two charged daughters in the tracker volume… What else could you want? Well, the idea was at least partially inspired by Barbara, one of the European ILC communicators, based at DESY. So, Barbara, I hope you like the pictures… I do have more, actually. 😉
Proud detector builders: Felix, Ivo, and myself... I suspect a real ILC detector might be a tiny bit more complicated.
Well, now it is time to head home, I hope my flight gets called soon. Weekend, finally… Although I probably have to put in quite some work, my lecture for Monday still needs to be finished, and there are also many other pressing things to do…
