Imperial HEP in the spotlight

Afternoon,

Outreach has always been a strong part of Imperial's High Energy Physics group - indeed, the "Particle Physics Masterclasses" were a big factor in my decision to go into the subject. That's why it's an honour to be representing Imperial at the NESTA FameLab 2009 competition - a sort of "Pop Idol" for scientists - with £10,000 and a few Channel 4 "Three Minute Wonder"s up for grabs at the National Final at this year's Cheltenham Science Festival.



I won the Oxford regional heat with a three-minute talk about the search for Dark Matter at the CMS experiment - something the Imperial group is very strongly involved with, which of course nicely complements the group's involvement with Zeplin. The competition was tough - two Oxford "wildcards" also made it through to the final - but the day was an incredibly rewarding experience, providing the chance to meet and get some feedback from some of the top science communicators in the country. A big thanks to the FameLab team, who made the day such a joy to take part in - and to those who gave me the chance to develop my shows/technique with lots of practice (particularly during National Science & Engineerin Week). Outreach is difficult, and it takes time - but particularly when everyone is thinking very carefully about where their money is going, it's essential that we as scientists not only justify what we're doing to the UK tax payers, but also inspire them to really think about the mind-bending implications our results could have for our understanding of the Universe in which we find ourselves. Hopefully things like FameLab can help.

The final is this Friday (5th of June). I've spent a weekend with the other ten contestants for a "Masterclass" session, and they were all fantastic to work with and are certainly all worthy of winning - so it'll be down to the performance on the day. Whether I "Boyle" it, or really give our friend Prof. Brian Cox something to worry about, I'll keep you posted ;-)

You can also catch me at the Royal Institution on Tuesday 9th June, where I'll be giving my "Whatever is the Matter?" public lecture about the LHC-based search for Dark Matter - the hypothesised "missing fifth" of the Universe.

Oh, and 10 points for anyone who can guess what I'm doing with my hand in the video.

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.

Ask me... I'm an expert

Remember the posts about the Big Bang exhibition at the Science Museum? Well, if you haven't seen it yet hurry up. It's on until the 7th of October, after which it will be replaced by [not allowed to tell ;-) ].

To add a little more action to the displays the Science Museum set up a little interactive event last week where they would show some kit and have a couple of scientists explaining it. The plan was to have a cosmic ray detector and some Geiger counters. We provided the latter but they were quite useless in the end as nobody was able to bring anything even remotely radioactive to make them tick. So we concentrated on cosmic rays, which was not a bad idea anyway. Our colleagues from Bristol provided a scintillator and a small spark chamber, definitively the star of the show. It's much smaller than the huge one Imperial and RAL built long ago and we could not get to work again. At least the Bristol chamber worked nicely. Don't know if there's a lesson here...

It was a lot of fun explaining cosmic muons to the general public (although the general public found at the Science Museum is a quite biased sample) and answering the most unexpected questions. How do we know they are muons? Where do the cosmic rays come from? How does it work? Could they have triggered life? What's this black thing? (the trigger). Wouldn't the muons have all decayed before reaching the ground? (This guy knew more than expected). How do you get a satellite on orbit? Hmmm, somewhat unrelated, but I had a tag saying "asking me... I'm an expert" so I just had to know.

Many thanks to the Bristol guys David, Clare, Ben and John for providing the nice kit and to Will and Tom for representing Imperial.

Finally I agree with Gavin: we should try to build a similar chamber and display it on level 5.

Rector supports blog

Last Friday Imperial's rector Sir Richard Sykes visited CERN - in particular the two experiments with IC involvement CMS and LHCb.

The visit was supervised by CERN's VIP service, a guarantee that nothing can go wrong: 9:00 pick up at the hotel, 9:25 arrive at LHCb, visit. 9:45 go to CMS, photographer is waiting... and so on until the signature of the guest book at 14:15 (involving another photographer). A quite impressive organization that has not much in common with the usual "private" visits of LHCb or CMS.

So early in the morning Jim and the rector met us (Tatsuya, our spokesman, Will and myself) at point 8 for a visit of the LHCb detector. Tatsuya showed every interesting detail and let us enter any usually forbidden door. A quite interesting tour, even for LHCb members!

Of course we had a long stop in front of RICH1 where I tried to explain how it works (remember Cherenkov radiation?) and why we need such a device and CMS don't. I also took the opportunity to ask him if I could make a picture for the blog. That's when he said it was a great idea. One needs to be modern...

After a brief visit of the LHC tunnel we left Tatsuya and Will and continued to point 5 for a CMS visit. Since I hadn't seen CMS for quite some time (especially not since there's something in the cavern) I joined the CMS tour - which was really impressive. Not only because of CMS, but mostly because Jim knows every detail of it and seems to remember an anecdote about every piece of equipment. He also seems to remember each price tag...

The morning was quite challenging - the rector - a biologist - had many interesting questions and seemed very interested about the goals of the research and the technical challenges. I am also not used to being followed by a professional photographer all the time!

We then went to CERN for a lunch with Lyn Evans - head of the LHC project - and Geoff (who would later show the CMS tracker). Of course I tried to get a few insider information about when the LHC will start, but the official statement remains: there will be an announcement by the end of the month. (But feel free to drop by my office I you want to hear some unofficial statements).

Must See TV Tonight

Apologies to our vast international readership who do not have the privilege of paying the BBC licence fee, but tonight there will be a programme on BBC2 at 9pm, called, ahem, Horizon: The Six-Billion Dollar Experiment.

Yes, it is about the LHC.

Since there is absolutely nothing else on the telly tonight, I am sure the whole nation will be captivated by this programme.

Among the questions to be answered tonight:

• Will the BBC get the physics right?
  
• Might the LHC create a black hole which will gobble up the planet (a question that I was asked at passport control last month!)
  
• Will anyone tell them that "the God Particle" is a really really useless name for the Higgs? (with all due respect)
  
• Will any of our colleagues at Imperial HEP appear?
  
• How will Peter Crouch do against John Terry and Michael Essien?
  

Big Bang exhibition at the Science Museum

Some time ago I wrote about Fieldwork for the Science Museum and promised some updates. Back in February we were trying to repair an old spark chamber for an exhibition about the LHC at the Science Museum. The exhibition is now open but the spark chamber isn't there.

Dave spent a lot of time trying to repair the spark chamber and there is still a hope that it will go to the Science Museum. But it missed the deadline for the exhibition opening. The problem was with the trigger. The chamber is activated by two huge scintillators which produce a signal when a charged particle crosses. One is mounted below the chamber, the other is on top of it (it's the kind of gnu horns you can see on the picture in the original post). All the light guides (that guide the scintillation light to the photomultipliers) are broken. They can be repaired but that takes some time. Dave is working on that. As for the chamber itself, it looks OK. It produces nice sparks when activated by an almost random trigger.


The exhibition is essentially a huge cube of 5m size explaining in four zones what the LHC is about, how it works, how the detectors work and how the data will be analyzed. Or, well, as the exhibition is aimed at 14 to 17 year olds, it does not explain that much but gets a feel for how complicated and huge it is. The exhibition is actually called Big Bang (and that's what you'd read from the distance), as it's about recreating the conditions of the Big Bang in a laboratory. The illustrator made a great job drawing particles and collisions. I love his drawing of a cavern with all the ongoing activity! I won't say more. Come to the Science Museum (it's free) and see it.

The whole design process started (for me) in December where I attended a day long brainstorming session with 20 more physicists from various places in the UK. The team from the Science Museum was quite impressive at extracting as much information and ideas from us as they could. Of course many of them were not feasible, like putting a 1:1 picture of Atlas on the wall (rejected as it wouldn't fit: the museum is much too small!) or putting a real Grid node in the museum. Instead there's a lot of graphics, animations and small movies.

Then for several months we got spammed by the designer teams sending us text snippets to check for scientific accuracy. A month ago there was a meeting with the designer who explained us his ideas for the layout. Scientists and designers: two worlds collide... But we eventually managed to speak a common language.


Three weeks ago I got a mail asking if I was happy to be quoted in the exhibition saying "These high-energy collisions will replicate the conditions that occurred in the moments after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago". I don't remember having ever said that and would have said 14 anyway... They obviously got a lot of quotes from the brainstorming session and wanted to match them with real scientists. So I agreed provided they change the age of the Universe (!). The result is shown in the picture.