One of the things I like best about being a physicist is that, when I wander aimlessly through the halls, unaware of my surroundings, with disheveled hair, bare feet, and a look somewhere between intense concentration and lunacy on my face, this is considered entirely normal behavior.
Well, mostly normal, at least.
Like most other large particle physics experiments, CMS has a lot of management structure, physicists who effectively are just managers. As you can see these organizational charts are usually represented with a lot of inter-connected boxes. Which is why positions like this are sometimes referred to as boxes. Most of the important boxes, like the spokesman, our representative to the rest of the world, are elected by the collaboration. In the case of mere lower convenors, a team of wise senior physicists typically just finds you worthy, then nominates you and if you accept you have the job. Particularly for post-doctoral researchers these positions are quite coveted, as it proves (if you do your job well) that you have some form of leadership capabilities, one of the alleged requirements for a tenure track job.
Today is a special day for me, as I have accepted to help run the CMS pixel detector software group for a year (at least). I find this all highly exciting, as I suspect I will be learning a lot in this time, not only about our detector but also about how particle physics experiments, or at least CMS, are run behind the scenes. I even have a title, as I now am a Detector Performance Group convenor for the CMS pixel offline software. My own acronym and a box to put it on, whoo whoo! Essentially the title means that I have to make sure the software that is used to analyze and reconstruct pixel data is in a good state. And that means keeping track of all different actitivities that go on in the development, making sure things stay up to date, etc. And that means… guess what: meetings.
So, I got my little (and yes this really is quite a minute) box. I wonder what’s next. I suspect many more meetings.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention with the entry title, I of course have to admit that there are no big explosions at CERN. That’s a good thing, too, because I’m talking about really big explosions.
CERN, like any big laboratory or university, has a fair number of lectures and colloquia on various topics in physics. One of the great things about being a physicist, and a physics student in particular, is that going to these lectures counts as work, at least if it doesn’t get in the way of things that have to be done. Since my work this week was mostly meetings about getting a new project and passing the old one off to another person, along with writing an ATLAS Infernal Internal Note on the old project, I had the opportunity and need for any educational breaks I could find.
As it happened, there were three very interesting talks by Princeton Professor Adam Burrows. Their nominal subject was “Black Holes and Neutron Stars,” but what he really wanted to show was stars exploding. The first talk, which was definitely my favorite, had a lot of movies and simulations of exactly that. A particularly pretty example is this movie of a Type Ia Supernova:
The neat thing about that video is that, not only does it look good, it’s also a real simulation. One of the main things I learned from the talks is that a substantial obstacle to understanding the details of supernovae is a lack of computing power: there are a lot of ideas about how they work exactly, but none of them come out quite right in simplified simulations. For example, Type II Supernovae probably need to lose their spherical symmetry so that the explosion can spread along one axis while new material collapses into the core from other directions, but it’s not clear exactly how this happens, and it can’t be simulated properly in only two dimensions.
Jokes about avoiding real work aside, it’s quite valuable for physicists to keep up with work in fields that are somewhat removed from our own work; you never know what interesting connections might come up. The details of supernovae have a lot of particle physics in them; for example, there are a tremendous number of neutrinos produced. In fact, neutrino detectors were the first instruments to “see” Supernova 1987a, because the weakly-interacting neutrinos escaped from the star a few hours ahead of the rest of the explosion.
[Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)]
