Winter Seminar in Austria

This seminar was organised by the Institute of Applied Physics of Frankfurt University and is the 25th year that they've been doing this. The venue was a lodge, owned by Frankfurt University, about 200 miles away from Frankfurt in a region called Kleinwalsertal just over the border in Austria.

I have to say that I was a little bit unsure as to how the workshop was going to go, seeing as most of the talks were going to be given in German and I only know a few words of German. However, I was reassured that the slides were going to be in English. In the end I found most of the talks quite useful and it was good to meet other people working on similar projects to the one I'm working on. As is usual with this type of meeting there was a strong work hard/play hard ethic. The day from 9am to 5pm was free so that people could enjoy the local scenery and make use of the skiing facilities. Talks then started from 5pm and went on until about 10pm (with a break at 6pm for dinner). I've always wanted to try a bit of snowboarding so this was going to be a good opportunity! Four other students from Frankfurt and I booked ourselves on a 3 day snowboarding course. And so over those three days I became acquainted with how to land on my bum, with a snowboard strapped to my feet, in various snow conditions: hard snow, ice and wet slushy snow!
By the end of the first day I could go fairly quickly down the slope but hadn't mastered braking so would have to do a controlled crash kicking up large amounts of snow in the process. At one point a little girl skiing past offered to help me up (at least I think that's what she meant, she was speaking in German). I politely declined! By the end of the second day I'd managed to master braking but only if I was on the front side of my board (i.e. facing backwards). If I wanted to turn right I was in trouble! By the end of the third day I managed to master turning right and getting my balance on both the front side and back side of the snowboard. I was feeling confident enough with my abilities that I took a short video on my digital camera as I came down the slope!

This meeting wasn't all play though. As I said talks went from 5pm until 10pm and after a days snowboarding keeping concentration was tough. Everyone else at the meeting was from a German institute and so the talks gave a nice overview of the accelerator physics projects happening at various institutes across Germany. It was very useful to find out about other projects that are similar to the one I'm working on (The Front End Test Stand) since there is no project even vaguely similar to ours in the UK. I gave an overview of our project and showed my little snowboarding video at the end of my talk, which went down very well! I thought there'd be a few awkward questions since there were many experts in the audience and I'm really learning on the job (you find a lot of that in particle physics, i.e. having to learn something whilst at the same time having to implement that method or theory!). But, everyone was incredibly positive and some people felt that they could also learn from what we are doing.

On the whole, it was a very useful seminar. I learnt some physics, drank some German beer, made some useful contacts, learnt about other projects, learnt to snowboard but most importantly, got invited back next year!