Only four days after leaving DESY last week (after the Physics Research Committee), I’m back in the North of Germany. It is still fall, no improvement of the weather in sight… Well, earlier this year I already commented on that, but this time Hamburg really lives up to its reputation. The reason for my visit is the annual workshop of the Terascale Alliance, a Germany-wide network on high energy particle physics, where I also attended a detector workshop earlier this year. This time also some politics was sprinkled in, with the Institute Assembly meeting, one of the governing bodies of the Alliance, last night. There, representatives of each institute in the Alliance (18 Universities, 2 Helmholtz Centers, 1 Max-Planck-Institute) discussed the current status and future direction of the initiative. This was actually quite important, since the mid-term review of the Alliance is coming up, which will decide on the continuation of funding, and also point the way for a possible continuation of this initiative.
Of course there was a lot besides politics. Many interesting talks and two social events, well presented by Ingrid. At the moment we are constantly running into each other at meetings all over the planet, no surprise since we are both working in very related fields.
Foolishly enough, I agreed last week to give a talk in the detector meeting at the workshop. While I like presenting results and new developments, at the moment I’m suffering a bit from travel overload, so I had to skip a few sessions this time to work on other urgent issues, including that talk. Among other things, I also talked about a new “virtual laboratory” on silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), already alluded to by Ingrid. These new devices are heavily used in the ILC calorimeter prototypes, and I have one student working on detailed studies of their applications in calorimetry. With the virtual laboratory, which is a collaboration of four institutes including my group, we are getting additional funding to develop electronics and to construct test infrastructure than can (and hopefully will) be used also by other groups interested to get into the SiPM game. “Virtual” here means that we are not actually sharing lab space, since the groups are spread out over Germany (Hamburg, Heidelberg Munich and Wuppertal), but we are still using common tools. Some real-life detector infrastructure, maybe not as tasty as the chocolate factory Ingrid is dreaming about, though…
