Quantum Diaries

Sitting underneath an alpine panorama in the Lufthansa Lounge in Munich: A last touch of Bavaria before heading out to Asia.

My travel spree continues, and while I’m waiting in the newly renovated Lufthansa Lounge at Munich for my flight to Beijing via Frankfurt, I have a few minutes to think back to my lecture at a teacher’s training event last Saturday. At a school in Zwiesel, a small town in some remote area of Bavaria, I was giving a lecture on black holes at hadron colliders, a topic I’ve been talking about frequently ever since I gave an extremely well attended lecture on this at the TU Munich in Summer 2008. Also this time, it was certainly something that kept the 100+ teachers awake and interested on a late Saturday afternoon.

I’m sure you’ve all followed the controversy on this topic, so I will not go into the details here. On the CERN website, answers to every conceivable scenario in connection to black hole creation can be found, proving beyond doubt that whatever we will create at LHC, it will be hopefully very exciting scientifically, but not dangerous for us and our planet. Actually just a few days before I gave my lecture, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court which judges on constitutional matters, came out with a press release about a decision on a complaint by a German citizen living in Switzerland, who saw her constitutional right to be save from bodily harm violated by the approaching start-up of the high energy run of LHC. For those of you that speak German, here is the link. It is a fantastic read. The court ruled that the complaint is not accepted, stating that the refusal to believe in well-established scientific laws is not sufficient to demand a stop to large scale science experiments. They clearly state that it is not enough to invent a disaster scenario tailored to a specific project, without providing a convincing chain of arguments that such a scenario could indeed take place. Otherwise, every large-scale project could be stopped by just inventing something crazy enough that would force the courts to end the projects. So, indeed, a very good ruling for science as a whole!

At the lecture, none of the teachers seemed worried by the experiments at the LHC, but they were certainly happy to be given arguments for discussions with their students. I hope I could also convey my excitement about the science ahead. While I personally think the creation of mini-black holes is extremely unlikely, it is certainly one of the most spectacular things that could come out of the LHC experiments: Finally, this would bring gravity into reach for particle physics experiments, and open a completely new world for us.

With that, I’m off to the Linear Collider Workshop in Beijing…

With lots of excitement surrounding the ramping of the LHC to 3.5 TeV with their beams as reported on here by Symmetry Magazine and the upcoming collisions @ 7 TeV from the LHC it is easy to overlook something of reported by the Tevatron via Twitter and Facebook

Tevatron Store 7682 terminated intentionally – delivered 8200 nb^-1. Store 7685 is now colliding with RECORD initial luminosity = 371 ub^-1/s!

This number was later amended by Ron Moore to report that it was actually 376 ub^-1/s a truly amazing feat. After more than 25 years of colliding, tuning, and learning the Tevatron is performing better than it ever has! Even more so, it is doing this with protons and anti-protons, as anyone in the accelerator world will tell you achieving these kind of initial luminosities were once thought very hard impossible with anti-protons.

As a person working on CDF (Collider Detection at Fermilab) I am very excited to see that our European counter parts are coming along and shattering world records and getting ready to push out the next era of physics. However, I can’t help but love to hear the news that the Tevatron is doing what it does, what it has done, and what it will continue to do…namely producing some of the best particle physics data in the game!

Thanks to all those in the accelerator world for making such valuable data for us to analyze!

Just barely 24 hours after getting off the plane from Chicago, I’m back again in the airport lounge in Munich, this time waiting for a short flight to Cologne/Bonn airport. I’ll spend the rest of the week attending the Spring Meeting of the German Physical Society in Bonn. At this annual event, essentially the whole German particle physics community gets together, so it is a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues. In addition, the breadth of the topics discussed there surpasses anything you can find in international conferences, which are usually way more specialized. So it is a great opportunity to find out about what is going on in fields a bit outside of what I normally do. There are some plenary talks in the morning covering a variety of subjects,  and a huge number of parallel sessions in the afternoon. The parallel talks are usually given by students, and each one of my students will be presenting their work at this conference. I’m not talking myself, a welcome change after the five talks I gave at the last meeting I attended, which will hopefully give me the opportunity to look around a bit and learn about things I’m not doing in my everyday life.

But attending the conference also means another few days away from home, again… At the moment, I’m really pushing the limit travel-wise. That reminds me of the final scene in the movie that gave the title to this post, which I saw on my way back over the Atlantic:

“Tonight, most people will be welcome home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over.”

Right now, this really fits the mood…