I have, in the last 48 hours, returned to the UK from my 18 month attachment at CERN. It feels great to be home again. My time there has been incredible and life-changing, but it also demonstrated that no matter how much you love a place and love your work, no matter how much you settle in, make friends, enjoy yourself, if it isn’t home then homesickness will still torment you. I missed those close to me so much it hurt. I would daydream wistfully about fish and chips. When it rained in Geneva I felt nostalgic for Birmingham. Sometimes, home is home is home and logic doesn’t come into it. I made the decision that in the long term, I want to be in the UK. Unfortunately, a consequence of this decision is that my career prospects now seem quite uncertain.

As Suzanne says, it really has been an incredible 2009, and especially so for ALICE. The year seems to be ending perfectly – early collisions brought about our first physics paper, and the data we have taken since is showing beautiful results. Our detectors are working well, and the physics we have been waiting so long for is finally happening. The year to come promises great things. This should be a happy time.

For the ALICE CTP group in Birmingham, as well as many other UK physics research groups, the mood has turned quite sour. Funding cuts to science this year have had disasterous impact on nuclear and particle physics. As a result, the Science and Technology Facilities Council have made the decision to cut completely the UK’s involvement with many international projects, including the ALICE experiment. Much of the UK’s research in nuclear and particle physics has been entirely dropped, which is highly damaging and makes long term prospects pretty grim. What I find hard to swallow is that many of these contributions were small, yet they were vital as investment for the future of the field in the UK.

The brutal way in which the cuts have been made seems to have left the worst possible dent in the field, which is unfortunately something I am not surprised by. During the funding crisis following STFC’s £80m shortfall, the UK’s part in the International Linear Collider was lost, and ALICE was already on dangerous ground (see my concerned letter to the Times). The Birmingham University group is the only one in the UK involved in ALICE, yet its impact is vital to the experiment. Not only are we working on important analysis areas (myself included!) but we are the group responsible for the Central Trigger Processor, without which the detector could not take data. We have been given until at least the next grant’s round in 2011 before the group will be dropped, and during that time we will be fighting the decision. Others were not so lucky and will be gone by Spring. The sheer scale of the loss for the particle and nuclear fields is hard to express.

I am very busy with work at the moment (there is quite alot to be done before the LHC restarts again next year) so I must stop here for now. I hope everyone is having a Merry Christmas. Those feeling the damage of the science cuts may be struggling to find festive cheer this year. I will be spending mine in Manchester with my boyfriend and family, so despite the terrible news I think I will find it hard not to be cheerful.

Steve Myers, opening our workshop yesterday morning.

For the last two and a half  days I’ve been at CERN, for a variety of meetings, including a two day workshop on the possibilities of a demonstration experiment for proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration.  I’ve blogged about this idea a while back, now a group is coming together to work towards an experimental verification of those ideas. A really positive message from this meeting is that CERN is interested, crucial since such a project can not be undertaken without the support of a strong accelerator laboratory. Steve Myers, the director for accelerators and technology at CERN, opened the workshop yesterday morning. For the last two days, accelerator experts, plasma experts and detector people have been discussing possibilities for the construction and operation of long cells of plasma, for the creation of very short packets of highly energetic protons and the like. The goal of the experiment will be to demonstrate high acceleration gradients, way beyond what conventional accelerators can achieve nowadays. If that works, who knows where this could go? A brand new solution for future particle physics experiments at the energy frontier is something we are all hoping for…

A possible site for the experiment: A steep transfer tunnel from the SPS to the CERN West Area.

We also managed to squeeze in a visit to a potential site for the experiment: A currently unused tunnel that connects the West Area (a huge experimental hall at CERN) with the SPS (the Super Proton Synchrotron, one of the accelerators here at CERN, and the final injector for the LHC). Since the SPS is something like 50 m underground, the tunnel has quite a steep slope. Here, a system for the compression of the proton packets from the accelerator could be set up, if we come up with a clever, cost efficient way to realize this. The plasma cell that will provide the acceleration would then probably be on flat ground at surface level in the experimental hall. On the picture you can see a few elements that are still left from the previous beam line in the tunnel. Now the details of the experiment have to be worked out, and a proposal to CERN has to be formulated. Exciting times are ahead, as a new project gets born.

Being at CERN at this very last day of the year that CERN is still open also gave me the opportunity to see the last LHC report of this year, where the accelerator and the experiments reported on their progress. Given the recent fantastic success of the LHC commissioning and first physics running, this event was a celebration of amazing first results achieved by incredibly well working detectors and by a smoothly running LHC. We were all sent off by Rolf Heuer, CERN’s director general, with best wishes for Christmas and for a happy new year, and the request to come back well rested for all the great things that lie ahead.

Today, it has started to snow here in Geneva, all of CERN is covered in a few white fluffy centimeters… And people are getting into a holiday mood. In a few minutes I’ll leave for the airport, my last flight (finally!) for this year…

Standing room only in the CERN Main Auditorium for the LHC Reports, as Fabiola Gianotti, the ATLAS Spokesperson, gives her talk.

We’re currently in a period of 5 weeks away from home. While part of this period consists of family visits, most of it we have spent in hotel rooms.
At home I have regular eating habits and a regular exercise regime which includes running, going to the gym, and attending ballet and yoga classes. Obviously giving up all of this for 5 weeks is not a good idea.
While already last year, we have been bringing our running shoes along on trips (which during this trip, we’ve already put to use in the English Garden and the Jardin du Luxembourg), this time, I am making an effort to do better.
In Munich, I took three classes at my old dance school (well, that was easy, it’s walking distance from the physics building and I knew exactly how things work there). At CERN, I attended a class of the CERN Fitness Club (only one I have to admit, since most of the time I was in a state of emergency preparing my seminar talk). And in Paris, we attended a class of the Iyengar Yoga Center (which has given both of us a memorable 5 day whole body muscle soreness). For our next stop, Zürich, I am in the process of figuring out where to go.
Obviously I have not been as good as I am at home (partly also because I am less than excited to go running at temperatures below the freezing point), but I guess given the circumstances I have to go with “better than nothing”.
As for sanity during our hotel room evenings, I brought my guitar along and am trying to practice a bit on most evenings. Even though a bit inconvenient, this is possible since we are moving by train within Europe, and it’s worth it because both Domenico and I are using it. And it allows me to bring a bit of regularity into these hectic traveling weeks.

On December 17 at 6PM the machine operators switched off the beam in the LHC

sending us greetings through our communication channel
(you can find here the status of the beam in real time http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1)

It has been an extraordinaty 2009. The LHC is back and it performed beyond expectations in the past couple of weeks (yes, it has been just a couple of weeks). The machine was able to provide stable beam (which means good quality beam with no risk of damaging the detectors) and the highest energy collisions in the World, breaking the Tevatron record with 2.36 TeV. ATLAS successfully collected hundred of thousands of candidate collisions. What you see in the beautiful visual representation of a reconstructed event is the production of “jets”.

Even though the LHC and the experiments have been built with the aim of discovering New Phenomena, standard “strong processes” are those happening more frequently, thus the ones produced and observed right from the beginning of data taking. What does “strong” stand for? The protons in the two circulating beams are made of quarks (the name “quark” was taken by Murray Gell-Mann from the book “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce).

Quarks are – based on today’s knowledge – elementary particles (they are not composed of other particles), and there are six of them coupled in pairs due to common properties. The lightest quarks are called “up” and “down”, slightly heavier ones are the “charm and strange” and finally the “bottom and top”.

The mass of the quarks ranges from small (0.001 times the mass of the proton) to the largest mass observed in particle physics so far (170 times the mass of the proton).

Each quark is accompanied by an antiquark with a different charge. What is  unusual is their fractional electric charge, for instance the top has charge +2/3 while the bottom has -1/3. The youngest quark is the top quark, discovered at the Tevatron in 1995. Quarks interact via quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the “strong interaction”. In the same way as the electrons interact via quantum electrodynamics (QED) thanks to their electric charge, quarks interact via their “color” charge. In fact, quarks carry colors (red, green and blue) which however has nothing to do with our daily concept of color. One important characteristic of QCD is called the “confinement”: the force between quarks does not decrease as the quarks separate.  This results in not being able to see quarks separately, but only bounded to form composite particles (the top is exceptional in this respect). While travelling through the detectors they generate showers of such particles called jets”.

Our collaborators in ATLAS scanned the data collected so far looking for signs of light particles, composed of quarks, being produced. In the first runs of data taking, we could already re-discover three of the quarks. We observed a bound state of light quarks, the u and d quarks, and once more data had been collected the strange quark – in form of resonance (a peak) – appeared on our screeens!

Finally, let me conclude this fantastic year with the words of the Director General at CERN “It has been a fantastic year for the LHC [....] I want to underline the fact that it has been made possible by the unique global collaboration that is particle physics. It has been truly heart-warming to see the community pulling together to achieve its goals”.

See you in 2010!

Last week on Tuesday night my wife and I were invited to the opening ceremony of a new exhibition in the Deutsches Museum, the biggest science and technology museum in Germany. The exhibition, called “The Evolution of the Universe”, was created by scientists from the Excellence Cluster ‘Universe’, to which I also belong. The exhibition shows the links between particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology, and tells the story of the evolution of the universe from the big bang to today, and even looks at what lies ahead.

The story starts with theories about the very first instances after the big bang including inflation and then moves into the realms we are now probing with the LHC. There is a slice of an LHC main dipole magnet, and a real piece of the ATLAS silicon strip tracker SCT. It moves on through primordial nucleosynthesis to the formation of neutral hydrogen, the point where the universe became transparent. This is as far back as we can look today by studying the cosmic microwave background. From there it is on to star and galaxy formation, the role of dark matter and black holes in the structure formation in the universe, and the synthesis of heavy elements in supernova explosions. It ends with a look at the effects in an ever expanding universe. All these topics are also being studied by scientists within the Excellence Cluster.

The exhibition was professionally designed with the help of the agency “Die Werft”, and is definitely a pleasure to look at and to explore. There are interactive models that show the effect of dark energy and dark matter on the structure sizes, the role of black holes in galaxy formation and the origin of different chemical elements, to just name a few.

If you happen to pass through Munich, the Deutsches Museum  is always worth a visit, and this new exhibition in the astronomy section makes it even more attractive.

Picture Credits: KB Media

The first second of the universe, with an illustration of CP violation, and a slice of an LHC dipole and a piece of the ATLAS SCT.

The microwave background: As far as we can look back in time.

A place to rest and to admire the wonders of the universe.

For more information on the exhibition (in German), and more pictures, go to

http://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstellungen/naturwissenschaft/astronomie/ausstellung/kosmologie/
http://www.universe-cluster.de/news/newsdetails/article/1/Ausstellung-im-Deutschen-Museum-eroeffnet/

後輩のY君と話していた時に、「理系は文系を馬鹿にしていると思われているか否か」という話になりました。
ちょっと複雑ですね。つまり、理系であるところのY君が文系であるところのY君の友達に「理系は文系を馬鹿にしている」と言われたらしいのです。
それは言外に「理系（Y君）は文系（俺）のことを馬鹿にしている」と言われたんじゃないかな、と思いましたが、Y君の友情についてはひとまず置いておいて、現実にそういうことがあるでしょうか。
あまり理系文系を意識しなくても、という方もいらっしゃるでしょう。もちろん人と個人として付き合う時には、「文系は論理的でない」「理系は情緒が分からない」などと言い合うのは愚かな話で、その人の感性は理系にも文系にもカテゴライズされない一つの個別的なものとして、確固としてあるわけですが、その人の専門とする領域、理系的学問と文系的学問、また理系的職業と文系的職業、といった意味で、理系文系の違いや共通点、お互いがお互いをどう思っているかを議論することは意味があることだと思うのです。
理系と文系がお互いを尊重しあう社会を作らなければ、第三次世界大戦が理系VS文系で起きないとも限りません。
少なくとも男子VS女子で起きるよりはありそうな話です。

O六M広、25歳独身、理系大学院生、彼の場合。
「文系に行くと理系に転向しづらそうだけど、理系に行けば文転も出来るよね」
そう思っていた時が僕にもありました。というか、高校生の時に理系を選んだのはそういう理由です。しかしそれは軽視していることとは少し異なります。文系の方が理系より簡単そう、と思ったのではなく、理系の学問は文系のそれに比べて使用する技法が幾分か特殊であり、数学や物理、実験のテクニックを後から勉強するのは大変である、という認識があったからです。しかしあくまでそれは技法の問題であり、学問が扱う対象の問題ではありません。理系学問と文系学問が扱う対象は違っていて、どちらが優位であるか、というのを問うのは無意味であります。

以上、弁解でした。もしも「理系（O六）は文系（俺）のことを馬鹿にしてるよね」と言われた時のために。

馬鹿にしている、かどうかは置いておいて、理系学問を専攻した人と文系学問を専攻した人がお互いをどう思っているか、はアンケートなどで調べてみたいですね。
と思ったら既にありました↓（高校生ですが）
http://www.nistep.go.jp/achiev/abs/jpn/rep012j/rep012aj.html