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.

We're all going on... LTA

Since the end of our coursework and final presentations there has been a steady stream of my fellow first year students leaving for exotic places and now it's my turn - off to CERN and Geneva on LTA.

An LTA (Long Term Attachment) is intended to get the students closer to our experiments as we try to make the transition from being clueless to useful in our adoptive teams - hopefully.

I joined LHCb and have already found it very useful being out here. CERN is the hub of activity for the (close to 60) institutions working on the project, whether based here or visiting, and I've had the oportunity to learn a lot in just a few short weeks.

Yesterday, I went underground to visit the experiment for the first, and maybe the last, time as it will be closed at the end of this week in preparation for the start-up of the collider. Many people have invested a lot of years and effort in the project and it was very impressive to see in all it's detail - even if it was difficult to reconcile the simplified diagrams that I knew with the mass of metal supports and cabling I saw.

As a UK-funded student, I'm living in a studio apartment arranged for me by STFC. It's in Geneva, close to the Old Town and about an hour's commute to the office at CERN. I recently got married and my wife has moved out here with me. She's finding plenty to do in the city, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere, shopping in outdoor markets and getting to grips with the local language.

French isn't essential here, with Geneva's large ex-pat community and English the common languge at CERN, but it helps to get the most out of what seems, so far, to be an interesting place to live.

The 2008 IoP Particle Physics Conference

Every year the great and the good of the UK HEP community (and a load of Ph.D. students) gather for the annual meeting of the particle physics group of the Institute of Physics. Over three days at the beginning of April the University of Lancaster played host to this year's conference.

The main programme was split into plenary sessions, which gave an overview of research in the field, and parallel sessions, which gave third year Ph.D. students (among others) a chance to present a talk about their research at a conference. The plenary sessions were great as they lifted your eyes up from your little corner of research to see something of the bigger picture (in the interests of shameful self-promotion of the Imperial HEP group, Prof. Jim Virdee opened the first plenary with a really interesting talk on the work that's been done to get the LHC detectors ready for LHC turn on, as well as some of the development that's been required to get to this stage with some really nice photos of how CMS has come together over the years) whilst the parallel sessions not only gave us third years a chance to present our work but also to see what everyone else has been up to (again, all the presentations that I saw by people from Imperial were excellent). There was also a poster session with a heavy T2K flavour, although there was a very interesting poster outlining the excellent work that's being done by the guys working on the Front End Test Stand...

As well as the academic program, an evening out in Lancaster and a conference dinner allowed for plenty of time to catch up with those who've been away on long term attachments (I think it was the first time that all of my year have been in the same place since our first year lectures!) as well as an opportunity to meet other people in the field. The night out in Lancaster saw a load of students do their best to take over a pizzeria, several very pleasant, very local pubs and (so I'm told) a closely fought drinking contest.

There was also an STFC Town Meeting during the conference, which given the recent funding problems, was a interesting introduction to physics politics. Never let it be said that physicists aren't passionate about what they do!

It was great to take some time out to be reminded of what we're all working towards, see what everyone's up to and catch up with people who haven't been around Imperial for a while but now it's back to the real world. I'm sure others can fill in any details that I've missed out...