Travel

I promised Yoshi in front of the entire group that I would make a post to the Blog, so true to my word, here is a first effort.
As you are no doubt aware, the possibilities to conduct a HEP experiment in the UK are nowadays rather limited. Much of the group is involved in experiments which take place overseas. Ideally we send people overseas for an extended period of time, a Long Term Attachment (LTA), which allows them to minimize the effects of travel, and maximize their ability to participate in the experiment they are working on. This arrangment works well, but for some of us it is necessary to be both here and at the experiment at the same time. In some ways this gives us the best of both worlds, but it has the nasty side effect of requiring a lot of travel.
A typical morning for me at Imperial might actually begin at 5am in Geneva. There is flight that leaves before 7am and arrives in London so that I can be at Imperial by 9am. I can say with confidence that there is absolutely no glamour in the "jet-set" lifestyle. But honestly this is a pretty easy commute. 10 years ago when we were setting up the BaBar experiment at SLAC (near San Francisco) I regularly flew between California and London, a commute which can test your endurance, and involved regular resetting of my internal time-zone.
Members of the group are currently working overseas on experiments at Fermilab (near Chicago), SLAC (near San Francisco), CERN (near Geneva), and in Japan. There are some ways in which technology has made it possible to avoid some of the travel. Participating in meetings via telephone/video/internet conference is now much more practical. There are several systems where presentations are posted to a web site, and so particpants can see all the material on their local machines, and then follow and participate in the discussions via the conference call. This works reasonably well for many working meetings, and is used by most members of the group. There are difficulties with this as well due to the spherical nature of the earth, meetings which take place in the evening in Japan are in the morning here, meetings in the evening here are in the morning in California, and so there is actually a rather small window of "working hours" where these conferences can take place without causing one side or another to come in very early, or stay very late. Some times, however, it is just necessary to travel. It isn't yet possible to plug in cables on the telephone, and sometimes you just need to be in the same room as your colleagues or your detector to work through a problem.
I've picked out some of the difficulties of the travel, but it also comes with a lot of benefits. As well as getting to work in some very nice places, one gets the opportunity to work with colleagues from around the world. These interactions are extremely valuable in broadening our work methods and our ways of approaching various problems.
That's it for now, I've got a plane to catch...

Starting Out

It's the start of a new academic year and, for me, it's back in from the cold of the "real world". After 4 years working as a Market Analyst I'm having a great time settling in to a new life as a Postgraduate Student in the Imperial College HEP group. I dare not whisper "PhD Student" yet, as we have to get past year 1 first...

I'm one of 12 new students this year, which is apparently the highest number since 197_. We're an interesting mix of people, with a half-dozen countries represented. In the first term the focus for us is on study, which is especially useful for someone like me who's undergraduate notes are already browning with age. We have started a handful of courses so far, taught by members of the HEP group, and are also free to attend any interesting undergraduate courses; which most of us have been taking advantage of, when our schedules allow.

By the end of November, we're expecting to have been assigned to the projects that will take us through the full 4 years. There’s been a lot of discussion among us students already and a bit of early bribery from some of the staff – thank you for the beers all of you. We’re expecting some more formal presentations over the next few weeks and then we should have a better idea about who we should be buying the beers for.

Because there are so many of us this year, we're not all in the same office but being kept more-or-less together has been a great way to form some promising friendships already. I'd like to invite any of them who reads this to add a comment so we can hopefully give anyone thinking of starting here next year a good idea about what to expect.

How fit is your collaboration?

Social events are an important part of about any scientific conference. Some argue they are even the most important part of the programme as they allow people to get together and discuss in a more relaxed atmosphere than the three minutes question time after the talks. Usually one half-day is reserved for some kind of excursion.

It was no different at the LHCb collaboration week in Saint Nectaire a month ago. On Wednesday afternoon we could choose between (a) a guided tour of six roman churches, (b) a guided visit of a volcano, or (c) climb the Puy-the-Dôme. From the 200 participants, 130 chose option (c), a 500 m climb of the landmark mountain next to Clermont-Ferrand. The organizers counted 3h30 for the hike and told us to hurry up if we didn't want to miss the bus. Actually everybody had reached the summit in much less than two hours. Some of us even made a detour to climb the Puy de Pariou, a small volcano with a nice crater (straight under the blue paraglider on the picture above). We were all quite impressed by how fit the collaboration is! Nobody expected that so many people would choose to climb a mountain between two meetings.

We also elected a new spokesman for the LHCb experiment. After more than 10 years in charge of the design and construction of the LHCb experiment, Tatsuya Nakada will step down as spokesman next year. The new spokesman-elect is Andrey Golutvin, director of ITEP Moscow and co-convener with Ulrik of the rare decays working group. A new era is starting, with a new spokesman and hopefully real data very soon.

HEP vs SPAT football match

It was billed as the battle to see who held sway over football bragging rights in the Physics department. HEP vs. SPAT. There were many volunteers on both sides. The mouth watering clash was six weeks in the making and took place on Thursday last week - 04/10/07...or should have. Thanks to Murphy's law it did not. The SPAT footballing maestros couldn't put their money where their mouth was and pulled out at the worst possible time - the morning of the match. Apparently, a sweeping bout of freshers flu was to blame! Turning disappointment into action, HEP (Ajit, Aaron, Onuora, Tom) decided to go ahead and play. Fortunately, Deltadot (Wen, Mark, Gary, Dave, Reese) was at hand to oblige.



The match, which took place at Hyde Park, ended 7-5 in favour of Deltadot. It was evenly balanced for the first fifteen minutes as both sides probed for an opening. Deltadot finally made the extra-man count to get on the score sheet. The game was evenly poised at 2-1 in favour of Deltadot with both sides missing a few gilt-edged chances. At 7-4 they seemed to be running away with it but HEP pegged them back with uncompromising defence and a goal at the death.

Good job lads!