My summer project at Imperial

After spending my last 3 months with this department over the summer, I wanted to share my experience with you via this blog. Either that or I was strongly encouraged by my supervisor Yoshi! I am a 3^rd year undergraduate here at Imperial and I worked in HEP over last summer as part of a UROP (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/urop) scheme.

Although not as extravagant as other blog entries on this site, with students travelling to Japan and Switzerland, my placement in the Blackett lab was just as enjoyable and rewarding. I was working with Yoshi and Ajit on the COMET experiment. In particular I was using computer simulations to optimise both a collimator and the fantastically named lagger-tagger, a name that Yoshi is still trying hard to get adopted by the particle physics community (hopefully not in vain).

I spent most of my time working with Ajit, who was very helpful, giving me lots of his time and expertise. His crash course in particle physics allowed me, who had not studied the subject yet, to understand enough of what was going on to do my project. I started by getting familiar with some of the tools of the high-energy physicist. First on the list was the hilariously steep learning curve required to use ROOT, and its 20 years worth of quirky workarounds, providing endless fun for the data analyst (I also wonder if the Windows version of ROOT is called Administrator). Second was G4beamline, a brilliant piece of software, with documentation so in depth and confusing that presumably only the person who wrote it can use all of its myriad features with any degree of confidence. Joking aside these are impressive programs, testament to group collaboration over years, and they allowed me to complete my project without much hassle at all.

The next part of my work was at the Daresbury Laboratory, working as part of the team building the detectors for T2K. This was useful as I could see another stage of an experiment, its actual construction, rather than its design. When I received the email telling me that the detector I had worked on had been shipped out to Japan it gave me the feeling that I had provided something real to an huge multinational experiment.

Another enjoyable part of my work over the summer was the opportunity to be a part of a research group, thankfully the High Energy physics group was welcoming and I got on well with all that I met, meeting for lunches and the occasional night out. The experience has convinced me to do a similar project next summer and to apply for a PhD place after my degree.

All in all I had a great time doing my UROP placement here, it was hard work, but very rewarding. Looking around this blog, I have only one regret, that I didn’t take more photos of myself smiling, standing in front of physics equipment.

Thanks to Yoshi and Ajit for their time.

Dave

CERN and first collisions at LHCb

The last few months have been very exciting here at CERN. Ravi and me are currently on a long term attachment (LTA) at CERN in Geneva, working on the LHCb experiment. Both of us have been out here for nearly a year now and a lot has been happening during this period. We experienced the entire process of the LHC being repaired, new start up dates getting announced, etc... and of course working with monte carlo simulated data only so far!
But since last year things have changed as I am sure most of the readers of this blog will know. In November we saw the first beam circulating in the LHC after its repair. The LHCb detector was in good shape: Before Christmas LHCb was recording its very first data (it could not detect cosmics before due to its horizontal alignment)! Meanwhile the LHC people were testing their machine extensively in order to be ready for the official date of first 3.5 on 3.5 TeV collisions a few weeks ago (30.3.2010)... And it was a huge success! Since then LHCb has been taking several million events, stored and ready to be analysed (for example by PhD students like Ravi and me). So far we have done a pretty good job :) I want to point out Ravi being the first one to see hints of a D0 peak in the collaboration (and me hunting J/Psi peaks)!
The following picture was taken on 30th March, at 12.59, in the LHCb control room, showing Andrei Golutvin (in the red jumper, LHCb spokesperson and my supervisor) watching the LHCb event display showing first collisions (notice the two green muon tracks, coming from a J/Psi?):




It is a very exciting time to be here at the moment. Being part of this unique science community is truly special. Everyone who has been at CERN knows what I mean - at this place history in particle physics has been written. This becomes obvious every day - for example when walking past the Gargamelle bubble chamber, Tim Berners-Lee's office (where the "web" was born) or Jack Steinberg in person (actually, he is in the office opposite to mine and sometimes asks for help with his computer) - just to mention a few occasions. CERN also organises events and lectures: To celebrate the LHC an incredible number of Nobel Prize winners of the field came together last year and gave highly interesting lectures stretched over two days. Gerard 't Hooft was even so kind to be in a picture with a few IC students (and ones that used to be):





Of course CERN's location between the Swiss/French alps and the Jura offers many opportunities to throw yourself down a mountain on some sort of ski or snowboard. So during the long wait for the turn on date a common activity of the UK PhD students here at CERN was to organise numerous trips to Chamonix and other resorts. It should be mentioned that Ravi won the prestigious CERN ski club downhill race in a new record time (~2.13 minutes)- well done! However, the season is over now, and the summer is about to start here in Geneva. The LHC is running, LHCb is recording data... Everything seems to be working very well, and - touch wood - hopefully it will stay like that! An interesting time lies ahead, and Ravi and me hope to witness signs of new physics here at LHCb!

First Neutrino Seen at Super-K, 295km from the T2K Beam Origin at J-PARC

This is the first neutrino created at the J-PARC laboratory, and sent across from the eastern coast of Japan, that was seen by the Super-Kamiokande detector, 295km away.

The picture shows the inside of the Super-K experiment, which is a vertical cylinder, filled with water, 40 metres high and a kilometre underground. The band in the middle is the side of the unfolded cylinder, and the two black circles are the top and bottom. The coloured blobs show the particles of light that were seen by the photon detectors that cover the inside of the cylinder, and the colours depend on the time when the light arrived there.

The rings that you can see formed by the coloured blobs are from the "Sonic Booooum" of light that made by the the particles that are created by the neutrino in Super-K. There are three rings -- the first two are bright yellow and obvious, but there is another one hidden there....

This is another image, with light-blue rings superimposed on it showing where the computer thinks they are. Making sure that we catch all the rings and interpret them properly is really important to get the right results out of our experiment.

There will be more to come, and when we see them we'll learn more about neutrinos, which can in turn tell us more about how our Universe came to be. For now though, we're happy that all parts of the T2K experiment are now working, from the beam, through the "near detector" that we built at J-PARC, and of course Super-Kamiokande.

We done to everyone who has been working all these years on T2K, and may the physics commence!

My first few months in Japan

The last few months have been very jam-packed and exciting, and so I thought that I would write a blog entry to share my experiences (and also, my supervisor, Yoshi, has been asking me to write one for months!). I am a second year PhD student working on the T2K neutrino experiment, and I moved to Japan a few months ago in September 2009, to live on-site. Having spent a rather frantic weekend bidding farewell to friends and trying to cram my life for the next year into 2 suitcases, I was finally on my way to the airport and en-route to Japan! I felt a mixture of excitement and apprehension as I took off, and so decided that the best thing to do was sit back and enjoy the facilities of Premium Economy on Virgin. I drank my glass of champagne, switched on the movies and settled into my larger than average seat for the 12 hour flight. (I should add that this was somewhat of a treat since all the economy seats were booked for that flight, and so it should not be expected by future students - sorry about that!) Having arrived in Japan and feeling rather tired , it was time to get my luggage, which turned into rather more hassle than expected. Despite assurances by Virgin that it would be very easy to pick up my second suitcase which had been shipped as cargo, myself and Gil found ourselves 3 hours later still hunting around an industrial park at Narita Airport looking for my suitcase! Thank you again to Gil for staying behind and helping me out! I definitely wished at that point that I had been more 'male-minded' and only packed one suitcase. However, after this slight delay, we boarded the coach and a couple of hours later I found myself in Tokai, my home for the next year. One of the first things I spotted was a McDonalds, which made me very happy , since I had been worried that I would only be eating raw fish and rice!

Fast-forwarding a week or so, I was lucky enough to visit the Super-Kamiokande detector, a huge underground tank filled with 50,000 tonnes of water, on the west coast of Japan. The neutrino beam is characterised by the "near detector" in Tokai on the east coast (where I am living), and then travels through the earth towards Super-Kamiokande on the west coast. As we drove up winding roads into the mountains, I was awed by the beauty of the area. A wonderful mountainous landscape, shrouded in mist and clouds. I was also struck by the remoteness of the location. We were staying in a town called Mozumi, which consists of about 20 houses and one Post Office. Entering the mine and standing on top of the detector for the first time was very impressive; a vast dome shaped cavern filled with cables and electronics huts which feed the tank below, lit by rather eerie green tungsten lamps. It was excellent to finally see the detector "in the flesh" from which I had been analysing data for the past 6 months.

That was about three months ago, and since then I have been living and working in Tokai. It has been an extremely exciting time, and lots of hard work! I consider myself very lucky to be on the experiment during this start-up stage, since there is a wide variety of tasks to get involved in, and a constant stream of new developments. Since the near detector is still under construction, you can go down "the pit" and actually walk around inside it. It has been very fun to take part in some "hands-on" construction work, for example, installing the water system to cool the electronics. With all of this excitement of course comes an intense work schedule. The hours are long, there are meetings at all times of the day and night due to the multiple time zones of the collaboration, and many tasks to juggle. It has been extremely tiring, but I feel that I have learned a huge amount in these past few months. It is good to be on-site and at the heart of the action, where everyone is working together towards a common goal. The control room was buzzing whilst waiting for the first beam shots to be fired!

Having said that, it is not all work, there is a lot of play too! Myself and the other students have visited Tokyo many times now, and seen and done many weird and wonderful things. There are too many things to describe here, but a particular highlight was going to the bar from the film Lost in Translation. The view was absolutely spectacular, making the extortionate prices well worth it (£ 15 equivalent for a glass of wine!). We have also been to a robot show and seen a scarily convincing android, stayed in a capsule hotel (not as unpleasant as I'd expected!), and accidentally got caught up in a Windows 7 launch party. I wanted to try the Windows 7 burger from Burger King (a tower of 7 burgers in one), but the queue was over an hour long. I have also been dragged on a horribly fast rollercoaster, which apparently goes through the middle of an office block and affords great views across Tokyo, but I wouldn't know because my eyes were tightly shut!

And there was of course the infamous Tokai halloween party!

All in all, it has been a very eventful and action-packed few months, and I am looking forward to the rest of my time here.