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.