Quantum Diaries

Wednesday evening I took my last D0 shift. I’m sure shifts have been covered here before, but we basically need people here 24 hours a day to make sure the detector is recording data, and fix any problems that come up. At D0, we have 4 people in the control room: 2 detector experts, 1 person making sure the collisions are being recorded properly, and 1 “captain” (the shifts I take) to make sure the good ship D0 stays on course. Or at least doesn’t stray too far off course.

My shift was 4pm to midnight, and frankly it was a little dull. But this is good – it means there were no problems, and we took lots of data. So at least I didn’t go out with a bang… Once a collision has been recorded, it is saved on tape at the Feynman Computing Centre here at Fermilab. Then, it gets moved to a computing farm to be “reconstructed”: turning all the 1s and 0s from the readout into more meaningful quantities, like the signal of a high energy particle. After reconstruction, it is ready to be analysed: I think the record for shortest time between a collision being recorded to appearing in an physics analysis that went public is just under 1 month. Occasionally we come across something unexpected when analysing a data sample, and have to trace it back to what was happening with the detector a few months or even years ago.

So we have to stay alert on shifts – not always easy at 4am on an overnight! If things really go wrong, we get the experts in: this is a picture from a much more exciting shift I had a few months ago.

……stands for, of course, ‘in the bag’ which is precisely where our recording is safely and
comfortably nestling right now.
We spent 3 hours in the studio and managed to easily lay down our one track (and almost
did the impossible and recorded two songs). It sounds amazing and we didn’t need more
than two takes to record any of the individual tracks. I take care of the vocals and it was
a pretty intense experience laying down this song with a difficult chorus to hit.
The song will be included on the upcoming ATLAS cd which will be available to give to your
best friends or worst enemies this coming Christmas. Accompanying it will be a dvd with
behind-the-scenes footage of the recordings, and interviews with the band members.

I’ll let you know when I know more about the release date. But for now we’re pretty
happy to have contributed to this outreach effort……and we’re proud of our work!!

One of the true joys of working in an internationally collaborative field like particle physics is the opportunity (necessity even) of getting together with colleagues from all over the world. For me, these meetings are an opportunity to look past my own day-to-day work and think about the exciting advances being made throughout the field.  And it is great to be reminded how my own work fits into a much much bigger picture. For most of us I think, even though we eventually become involved at a micro-level, it is exactly this big picture that drives us, that enticed us into fundamental science in the first place.

Courtyard of the Relais San Clemente hotel where the WIN 2009 workshop was hosted.

Last week I had the privilege of attending the 22nd hosting of the International Workshop on Weak Interactions and Neutrinos, known as WIN. The workshop was held at a beautiful hotel, the Relais San Clemente, outside of Perugia, Italy.

We were told during an opening session that a long-standing theme of the WIN conference series has been “maximum relaxation with minimum distraction” in order to harbor the free and easy exchange of scientific ideas between participants. This means that discussion is encouraged not just during formal presentations but over coffee breaks or at dinner. I, for one, ran into colleagues from past experiments and we discussed plans for further analysis of old data. I also met theoretical colleagues who are very interested in exactly the kinds of effects that the experiments I am currently working on will be studying. A continued relationship with such people should be invaluable to both groups. This, to me, is a great benefit of workshops like this where we all come together to discuss these issues in an environment absent of major distractions.

A discussion group session on neutrinos at WIN.

It was a great privilege for me as well that among participants this year were both the Director and Deputy Director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone and Young-Kee Kim. Pier wrote a column for Fermilab Today on Tuesday describing the conference and his plenary talk about a possible future facility here at Fermilab, the muon collider. My talk, on Current and Future Neutrino Cross-Section Experiments, immediately followed his on the second morning of the workshop, which was a great thrill for me (Although I was reminded the hard way that the second morning on an international trip is the peak of jet lag – whew, it was tough to get up and give my talk that morning!)

A coffee break where all could mingle and discuss freely.

A group at dinner in the city center of Perugia.

Typically, multi-day physics conferences (WIN lasted 6 days) include a half day without scheduled sessions. Often, an excursion is arranged for the participants to visit a nearby place of interest. For WIN ’09 that was the beautiful city of Assisi, Italy less than a one hour drive from Perugia. The conference organizers arranged for a bus to take anyone who wished to visit for a few hours in the afternoon. Assisi is famous for being the home of two people declared saints by the Catholic church, so there are two large cathedrals in the city to commemorate them. The Basilica of San Francesco (1181-1286 AD) is a particularly amazing site.

The Cathedral of San Francescso of Assisi.

A shot from the back of the bus as we drove away from Assisi.

As an important side note, WIN ’09 was originally to be held a few hundred kilometers to the south in L’Aquila, Italy near the National Scientific Laboratory at Gran Sasso. Tragically, the city was struck by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in April of this year and is still recovering from the horrible destruction it suffered as a consequence. Planning these meetings is always a ton of work for the local committee of organizers, but it must be said that the organizers of this particular workshop have done a tremendous job at putting on a truly world-class and wonderful meeting under such difficult circumstances. Not only did they have to change the venue at the last minute, but most of the active organizers live in L’Aquila.  I believe all attendees (this one at least) were extremely grateful for the wonderful job they did with WIN 2009!

Hello!
well, it took me a while to get started – I timed my first post to coincide with the Tevatron restarting of course…

Really, I’ve been trying to organise everything here for my move to CERN – exactly two weeks today. High energy physics is so international that people are coming and going all the time, and I’ve grown used to saying goodbye over the last few years. And because it is a fairly small community you always meet people again, which makes it easier. But it’s different when you are the one moving! I’ve lived in the same Chicago apartment for the last 4 years, which means a lot of memories and a lot of junk to sort through.

So, I got thinking about ways to summarise all that time. And this got me thinking about some of of those facts/stats that come up every now and then in physics to try to summarise a concept, or relate it to real life, like: write a year’s worth of LHC data on dvd’s you’d make a pile higher than the Eiffel Tower; or: the energy in a Tevatron collision is equivalent to two mosquitoes in a head on collision. I especially like ones where the analogy is stranger than the physics (I mean, we all know what a head-on mosquito collision is like, right?) and I’d kind of like to start a collection of these, so if you know a good one, I’d love to hear it – physics related is preferred, but not essential!

On quantum.diaries a lot of different sides of the life as a particle physicist were covered so far and I think a rather complete picture of this profession was drawn. But one tedious task was not yet mentioned (at least I can not recall), but we have to do it all the time – writing proposals.
We have to write proposals and submit it to the ministry of science to secure the budget for the institute, proposals to the EU to get additional funding, proposals to our directors to convince them about the importance of a new study, and, and, and ….
Of course it is very important that we carefully sketch our scientific plans and how we want to spend the money, also to avoid that the tax-payer’s money is wasted. But there are days, when I really do not like this part of the job.
A proposal has to be clear and complete; that sounds reasonable. But not only the actual scientific work has to be described, but also details on who should do the job, what is needed to do the job, and what technical support is needed. Sometimes one has to give an exact number of how many hours will be needed to get a job done. But this is the hard part about it. As we are doing science, we sometimes do not know how long it will take to reach a certain goal, as it was not done before. I really do not know how long it takes to design a new electrical board, program it and test it. It is a new board, otherwise we would buy it somewhere. All little details have to be checked carefully, and therefore a proposal can eat up a lot of time. And depending of the kind of proposal, it is send to its destination, and after some weeks the only thing one hears is, that the proposal was not accepted.
On the other hand all the work can be worth it. A few years back our proposal to the EU was accepted and the EUDET consortium was started. The EUDET telescope was partially financed by this consortium and therefore EU money is in it. It is a very nice project and it seems that the telescope was also needed, as it is now used by a lot of groups. So I will be keeping this in mind when working on a new EU proposal in the next 2 month ….

This year I’ve been involved in a band which has been a lot of fun. Predominantly for meeting some cool people
at CERN and making some great friends. Also, though, for making some great music. The name of the band is
AWESOME (Awesome, Which Exudes Some Outstanding Musical Excellence), where every good ATLAS physicist
knows the golden rule: everything can be made into an acronym!

The list of band members is too big to reproduce here (seriously), mainly due to the fact that our time here at
CERN is finite and people will arrive, join the band for a while, and then leave. Also, time constraints, travel,
and other responsibilities prevent us all from being available at all times. A current core group of 4 of us will be
heading to the studio this week to record two tracks specially prepared for an all ATLAS musical extravaganza
of recording. Essentially ATLAS will be funding a cd and accompanying DVD to document musical folks from
within the collaboration where at least one band member must be part of the collaboration, in our case though,
all of us are. The personnel heading into the recording fire are representative of the international nature of our
collaboration and are, myself (English), Eddie Nebot (Spanish), Christian Ohm (Swedish) and Pier Olivier
DeVieveros (Canadian). We’ve been working on some sample songs and come up with a cover we’re pretty happy
with and one we wrote ourselves. Things evolved and one thing is quite striking to me, I only met one of the band
members less than a week prior to recording. Pier has been working on the tracks remotely in Toronto and then
arrived at CERN and we had booked a set of practices. It’s weird that, in other bands, this would probably freak
people out, but it seems a bit natural in the physics world. You work with people remotely and get used to it.
We developed our songs by sending files back and forth and when we got together for our first combined practice
we already were on the same page. So after a few practice sessions together we wrote a bunch more parts to these
songs and we’re ready to hit the studio. Should be a fun time. We don’t have a huge amount of time but we’re
hoping to get our two tracks recorded, which might be a challenge.

I’ll let you know how it goes, but we will endeavour to make things AWESOME!