A good time to leave the country?

Like the other first year students working on experiments at CERN, part of my PhD is to spend a some time living and working in Geneva. The other five are already here, but other commitments have kept me in London for the past year.

With the help of the UK Liaison office at I planned to come out at immediately after the RAL Summer School that has been written about before. Before I left for Oxford all my stuff was boxed and ready to be shipped out leaving me about a month after my rent ended there to live out of a rucsac.

Despite having picked the most difficult time possible to come out, only just after the LHC first beam event, I was found a studio flat in Servette. So on Monday morning I said goodbye to London and headed for Heathrow. A couple of hours later I was leaving Geneva Airport loaded with more baggage than was good for me and a faint sense of foreboding.

A bus ride later I was at CERN picking up keys, braving the User's Office and then trying to work out my way back to the flat. The next day my stuff arrived, only a few hours late.

On Wednesday we had the "CMS September Fest" to celebrate the first beam through the experiment, the cumulation of twenty years work for some (quite a humbling feeling, having only been working on it for a mere year). Perhaps 1000 members of the collaboration came to the surface assembly building at Point 5 for a night of food, drink and a live performance of the LHC rap video many of you have probably seen (with dancers not anonymous this time - Tom).

Unfortunately this was slightly overshadowed by the news that due to a helium leak there are significant delays to the LHC - at least two months for warm-up, repair and cooldown of the affected section, and it seems unlikely that there will be any collisions until early 2009.

And to round off an eventful week, within a couple days of cooking for myself unsupervised I managed to food poison myself and spend the remaining two days in bed. Apparently French isn't the only thing I need to brush up on...

Amputating the Spider

For the past two weeks, just under 70 first-year PhD students (including 9 from Imperial) have been locked away in seclusion within the walls of Somerville College, Oxford as part of the HEP Summer School organised by STFC and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

With nothing to live on except masses of free food and coffee (if you were fortunate enough to be funded by the STFC), you would think we wouldn't have the energy to learn that much. But the gruelling, sometimes 9am-10pm sessions of intense teaching meant we probably came away knowing slightly more than before. A heavy dose of quantum field theory, QED/QCD and Standard Modelling satisfied even the most theoretically curious amongst us, and the experimentalists were probably not disappointed by the (admittedly collider-orientated) phenomenology lectures.

A stay in Oxford would be incomplete without a visit to its numerous pubs. We made sure to try a new one each night during the first week, followed by the King's Arms as it only closed at midnight. The most valuable lesson we learned from the school was that even if food and accommodation are supplied, you still end up spending the savings on liquid assets, and quite a few of us came away with much lighter wallets.

A trip to the Diamond Light Source was organised on the middle Saturday. We were given a quick talk about synchrotron radiation sources, then taken on a tour around the facility. The spacious, clean and relaxed control room was an eye-opener, given my only point of reference was that of MiniBooNE and ex-SciBooNE. After that was walking trip on top of the electron storage ring (video). We were assured that the metres-thick concrete would protect our delicate bits, and our hopes of a future generation. Finally we were shown one of the 25 beam line laboratories, one in which synchrotron x-rays are used to analyse biological crystal structures. Tea and biscuits followed, adding to our suspicions that the school was one elaborate plan to fatten us up and feed us to the LHC gods.

Speaking of which, the LHC Switch-On Day was not uncelebrated, with drinks provided by the organisers, and a couple of students went as far as to produce a model of the accelerator and experiments in cake form.

As for the title of this post, you will just have to go to next summer's school to find out what that phrase has to do with QFT. But if we are the spiders, and our legs are the shackles of first-year inexperience, then consider us amputees.

LHC start up

Amazingly nobody from the group has posted anything about the LHC startup. I'd hoped (and in fact promised Yoshi) to blog from the CMS control room yesterday but in all the excitement didn't manage it.

For those few who have no idea what I'm talking about yesterday the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was finally switched on after decades of planning and construction. Our group works on the CMS experiment, one of the two larger experiments at the LHC.

So what happened yesterday? Well the LHC is a 27 km long circular accelerator buried under the Swiss and French countryside near Geneva. Yesterday for the first time beams of protons were circulated all the way around the ring. The media coverage of the event was astonishing. Radio 4 covered it live (pleasing my mother very much) and journalists from all over the world were here at CERN all day. I think the best account from the perspective of our experiment can be found here. Plenty of nice pictures of events and a video. Perhaps a little technical in places, but I'd be happy to answer any questions on it. Hats off to Lyn Evans and company, if anything they made it look a little too easy!

So what does it mean? From a scientific perspective it's the start of a journey to exciting discoveries we hope. In the next weeks and months we'll be working hard to calibrate some of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever built. From a personal point of view all the publicity will make it much easier to explain what I do for a living to people in the pub.

Decommissioning SciBooNE

We have just done something on SciBooNE that has become somewhat rare in the field these days: we turned off the detector intentionally! On 18 August 2008, the SciBooNE neutrino beam data run offically ended at 08:00 in the morning (CDT). It seems like only yesterday that we put SciBooNE together and observed the first neutrino events in the detector, but we have now finished all the data-taking and have decommissioned the detector. Many of the detector components will be returned to their respective owners, but the main bulky parts will remain the detector hall until someone else decides to use the parts or the hall.

When most people learn that we decided to end the run, they are puzzled and ask why, apparently in the belief that we must have been forced to end the run. In fact, we ended the run mainly because we have already collected all the data we need to achieve the physics goals we set out to achieve, and it's now time to concentrate on the analysis of the data. Far from being a sad occasion, it was actually rather triumphant. (You can see how happy our Run Coordinator Hidekazu Tanaka, Columbia University, was to end the run in the photo at right. Also shown in the photo is Zelimir Djurcic, Columbia, who was the last SciBooNE shifter. (Photo courtesy of Hideyuki Takei.)

We spent a couple of weeks dismantling everything in the detector hall and sorting out all the parts for shipment back to their places of origin. As usual for us, most of that work was done ahead of schedule. To help out with the work, many of our collaborators came to the lab, and we had a large influx of young students as well. In the photo at left you can see several SciBooNErs working on removing the multi-anode photomultipliers from the top side of SciBar. From left to right are Yuki Kobayashi and Shunsuke Masuike, Tokyo Institute of Technology, co-spokesperson Tsuyoshi Nakaya, Kyoto University, Joan Catala Perez, University of Valencia, and in front is Katsuki Hiraide, Kyoto University. (Photo courtesy of Reidar Hahn.)

Yuki and Shunsuke are two M.S. students who came to Fermilab (and America) for the first time just to help with the decommissioning, and Joan and Katsuki are two of our PhD students and they've both been out at Fermilab for years building and operating the detector and of course working on data analysis. Actually, Katsuki recently presented our first preliminary physics result at the ICHEP08 conference in Philadelphia, PA. You can see him in front of a pretty large audience of neutrino physicists presenting the result in the photo at right. (Photo courtesy of Herman White.)

To commemorate and celebrate the end of the run we threw a big party at Fermilab on 22 Aug. You can see the invitation to the party up at the top of this entry. (The photo in the

invitation is courtesy of Reidar Hahn.) We had a nice simple cookout and a friendly game of volleyball which, unfortunately, the SciBooNE team lost to the MiniBooNE team. I guess we can't win them all...

(Photo courtesy of Joan Catala Perez.)