Today was another day of parallel talks. There was again six streams of talks, though the topics in each stream varied throughout the day. Additionally, a high school masterclass was run for high school students and a development day for high school teachers.
I mention these because I was asked to give a talk during the development day, introducing the teachers to the main concepts of particle physics. I was really worried about giving this talk as I haven’t had any interaction with high school teachers or students since I was a high school student myself. I also didn’t have time to really practice and refine my presentation. I did one practice talk last night at home, and received so many comments that I ended up completely rewriting the talk overnight. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to practice the final version of the talk, and due to the lack of sleep, got lost a few times during the presentation as well as during the questions. Hopefully the teachers got something out of the presentation, I definitely learnt a lot about presenting to non-experts. A skill that I’m going to be putting into practice very soon, as one of the teachers attending works at my old high school and asked me to go and talk to the students there sometime.
I spent the rest of the day in the heavy flavour physics sessions, which were mostly about searches for rare B, D and Kaon decays. I think I can probably summarise all the talks by saying that nothing was found to be significantly in disagreement of the Standard Model and/or results from other experiments…
And that’s it for Day Two of ICHEP 2012 for me. Until tomorrow everybody!
Tags: ICHEP2012
