A Happy New Year from Imperial T2K....

A seriously-belated Happy New Year to all avid followers of this blog from around the world!

2009 will be a very big year for many of us at Imperial High Energy Physics, most certainly including me and my colleagues who are working on the T2K Experiment.

I am writing this as the names of some towns such as Petrozavodsk have finally started appearing on the in-flight map after several hours of unmarked Arctic coastline. Being on a certain cash-strapped flag-carrying airline has meant that there was no functional personal entertainment system to distract me from map-gazing and some slightly more fun duties such as marking student reports.

So here we are flying back from a week of meetings at KEK, the Japanese national laboratory for particle physics, where each day was filled with over 12 lovely hours of non-stop sessions of presentations and discussion.

After several years of work, this year our experiment will finally see data from actual neutrinos flying 200 miles across Japan from the village of Tokai on the eastern coast, to Kamioka in the hills in the north-west of the country. Our physicist colleagues at the new accelerator complex of J-PARC are working hard to make sure that we get lots of neutrinos making this journey, because by the very nature of neutrinos, we will only be able to observe a tiny fraction of them in our detectors.

The neutrinos will be made by slamming an extremely intense beam of protons into a long rod of graphite, where "strong" interactions (in the particle physics sense) will produce a huge shower of light particles, which produce neutrinos as by-products as they undergo "weak" interactions while flying down a 100m-long tube. Everything from the source of the protons, to the initial straight accelerator which gets them moving as a beam, the smallish synchrotron ring that raises their energy to 3 GeV, and the mile-long 50 GeV Main Ring which follows, is all brand-new, and over the last year or so, each component has been commissioned and tested, and the protons have gradually crept closer to the dedicated neutrino beam line for T2K.

The picture at the top is the place where the graphite target goes, as of a week or two ago.

The energy of the protons is tiny compared to those in the LHC (a GeV is one-7000th of the LHC energy of 7 TeV), which will also be turning on this year, but the power of the beam is what matters most for us, and will be the highest ever for an accelerator like this, fingers crossed!

With the recent successful commissioning of the Main Ring at 30 GeV, the neutrino beamline is all that is left now, and almost all the components are in place for the superconducting magnets and array of beam monitors to be switched on in a couple of months' time, and protons fired into the graphite target. Eventually, the accelerator complex will try and put as much power into the beam as possible, to make as many neutrinos as we can, but initially it will only be configured to produce a little beam, so that things can be checked out and everyone is certain they are happy that we can start cranking the power up later this year.

The beam is of course not the only critical part of T2K, and many things have to come together for the experiment to work: a host of detectors which make sure the neutrino beam is how we want it to be and is pointing in exactly the right direction; the ND280 "near detectors", 280m away from the target, which we are working on in the UK, and which will look at the neutrino interactions in unprecedented detail so that we can understand the beam properly and correctly interpret what the neutrinos are telling us; Super-Kamiokande, the underground tank with 50,000 tonnes of water that will detect the neutrinos after their trip across the country. There is even an experiment at CERN, called NA61, which putting in time to measure exactly what happens when you fire a proton beam at the T2K graphite target. This is actually very subtle physics that no one is able to calculate with any confidence, and hence measuring this will be a big contribution to T2K.

Each of these parts of the experiment is making very rapid progress, which we confirmed over the course of the past week, and we talked things over to make sure that everything will work well when it all comes together over the next year or so.

For ND280, we are now running tests at Rutherford Lab in Oxfordshire, to make sure that the detectors we are building, called electromagnetic calorimeters, work properly, and also the electronics and data acquisition systems that are UK responsibilities too. These will need to operate reliably with many of the other detector systems being built by our T2K friends around the world, so we have to make sure everything works before it is sent to Japan to be put underground in the ND280 detector cavern.

Of course we don't just build an experiment and switch it on and then wait to see what happens -- it takes a lot of work to figure out how best to use information we see in the detectors, and we need to make sure we know what to do with it beforehand. Much of my work is centred on ensuring that once the experiment is turned on, we know that it is working properly, that we can extract from the data everything we need, and that we can analyse that information and turn it into physics measurements that we can publish. This involves a lot of software work and physics analysis studies, which is the most exciting bit for me. Our 2nd year students gave presentations to the entire collaboration on their work, and personally I thought they did rather well.

On top of all this physics to discuss, there is a host of logistical issues that we also have to sort out, such as when and how we send our detectors, and who with, and how many people we need at J-PARC and when, how many physicists will fit into a cheap flat in Tokai etc....

This meeting at KEK was a target for a lot of the work we have been doing over the last several months, but it wasn't the first set of hardcore meetings this year. In November, I suggested that we have a T2KUK Physics and Software meeting before the start of term in January. Somehow, this idea proved surprisingly popular, and the meeting grew to a full UK collaboration meeting, which our friends at Liverpool kindly hosted.

Sometimes we complain about how we get overloaded by meeting after meeting, but I think these big occasions when we get a large number of people together in the same room, are impossible to do without. It is not just the slide presentations and formal discussions, but the informal chats over coffee that can really help brings ideas together and new things get started.

Once we get back from a meeting like this, it is back to the rather more laborious daily routine of getting things to work, fixing them if they don't, coming up with new things to try, and in general trying to meet deadlines, half of them self-imposed. I hasten to add that a large fraction of the actual contributions come from our students, which is always very rewarding for us as well as the students themselves (I think).

Other things that happened while we were away in Japan include: a lovely sunny afternoon when the weather on my balcony reached 24C; about 7 different types of ramen noodles; a mysterious "frying thing of fish" for lunch at the KEK canteen; lots of "Rilakkumas"; snow at KEK; the party on the Friday night followed by the traditional karaoke which Dave finally came along to; my team losing 4 - 3 in the Cup....

Well, we are over Krakow now, and I think I should take a little nap before we land. Now that everyone who reads this blog is probably all T2K'd out, I'll refrain from writing about our experiment till our next major development -- which may not be too far off!

Postgraduate Open Day Wednesday 21st

Next week, we are inviting any potential postgraduate applicants to the group, to see for themselves what it is like to work and study here at Imperial High Energy Physics. You can find details of the Open Day and postgraduate opportunities on our web site, including who to email (Dr Ulrik Egede of LHCb, and postgraduate admissions committee chair) to ensure that you get your free lunch.

We've got various activities lined up for participants, which should be entertaining, so if you think you might like to join us here and work towards a PhD, and make friends with the ducks at Kensington Gardens, just let us know and come along on the 21st!

I wish I could be there myself to say hello, but unfortunately I will be at the KEK laboratory in Japan next week....

The LHC inaugration and the LHCFest

The official ceremony of inaugration of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) took place on 21.10.2008 which was attended by quite a few important people, especially from the CERN member states. There were also delegations from other countries from all over the world, the delegations typically headed by education or science ministers of the respective countries. There were also the guests invited by the Director General (DG) of CERN, which were mainly physicists from CERN and all over the world, and heads of laboratories and funding agencies.
The ceremony took place in the SM18, which is the testing facility for the LHC magnets. In one of its halls, expositions from all the four major detectors were set up, along with posters and displays of parts of the LHC magnets. So the guests were to visit this hall, where, apart from the science, they were also served the "molecular cuisine", which was an assortment of chef Ettore Bocchia's creations including the famous ice creams cooled with liquid nitrogen to maintain a velvety texture. I had the good luck of being there as one of the presenters at the LHCb exposition, and given my sweet tooth, I had a ball. And you can find me stirring the ice cream while liquid nitrogen is being poured!
Going back to the ceremony, the guests were then taken to another hall called SMA18 where they were to be seated for the rest of the evening. There was also an exhibition titled "Accelerating Nobels", which is a series of photographs of Nobel laureates who were asked to make a drawing of their Nobel discovery and hold it while posing for the photograph. Another interesting thing about the exhibition was the photographer's comments for each of the photograph, and the ones for Anthony Leggett (nobel prize 2003) were
"It’s quite a twist when atoms form pairs to allow for superfluidity, but Tony Leggett wanted to show exactly how they do it – with his hands! “But Professor, how can you hold up your drawing to the camera when you need both of your hands for your presentation of paired atoms?”, I ask. “Just tape the drawing onto me!”, he replies."
This is ofcourse my favourite picture....

The ceremony began with a speech from the DG followed by speeches by the distinguished delegates.
Then there was a concert named "Origins: concert for a collider", a celebration of the wonder of the cosmos and the glory of life on Earth, as expressed through the imagery of a nature photographer Frans Lanting and the music by Philip Glass.
This was the end of the formal ceremony and the guests left by 1800.
The LHC Fest, which was open to all CERN users, included a buffet and a concert, was to start from 1830. Both the exposition hall and the ceremony hall were open so one could look at the displays by the four experiments and the Accelerating Nobels exhibition. There was a speech by the DG and also a performance of "Origins" for the fest. After which, the buffet was served at 2030 and a concert followed, which was in full swing even as I left around 2300. It was a very enjoyable evening overall and I am glad I was able to experience this unique day.

Elephant in the room for the Nobel Prize in Physics!

On Tuesday it was announced that Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008. The award is "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." They share the prize with Yoichiro Nambu for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, a process vital to the derivation of the Higgs mechanism which gives particles mass in the standard model and which, as has been well publicised, is major part of the physics to be investigated with the LHC.

The work of Kobayashi and Maskawa concerns a slightly more obscure asymmetry in nature, so called CP violation. Essentially CP asymmetry reveals a subtle difference between the weak nuclear decays of some particles and their corresponding anti-particles and forms a cornerstone in the investigation of why the universe is made of matter and not anti-matter. It was first observed experimentally in the 1960s and at the time posed a theoretical conundrum. Kobayashi and Maskawa showed in the early 1970s that this effect could be incorporated into the standard model if there are at least 3 generations of quarks. This effectively predicted the yet to be discovered top and bottom quarks. Their work built on the flavour mixing formalism developed by the Italian Nicola Cabibbo and resulted in the so called CKM (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa) matrix.


The ultimate test of the CKM matrix came this decade with the operation of the B Factories; BELLE in Japan and BaBar in the USA. These experiments produce pairs of B mesons (particle and anti-particle) and study their decays looking for the effects of CP violation predicted by Kobayashi and Maskawa. In 2001 both collaborations reported the first experimental observations of CP violation from B meson decays, completely in agreement with the CKM matrix formalism. They have since made scores of similar measurements all consistent with the model. Imperial College has been heavily involved with the BaBar experiment (named after the eponymous cartoon elephant who is also the experiment mascot) for the duration of it's running, which was completed earlier this year. We continue to work as part of the collaboration who are now analysing the final data set. Currently the Imperial group are looking at the effects of radiative penguin decays which can further constrain the elements of the CKM matrix.

It is the success of the CKM mechanism under intense experimental scrutiny which has made Kobayashi and Maskawa deserving winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics.

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.)

Beam in LHCb

Its been a long time coming but sometime late on Friday evening, the first beam from the LHC passed through LHCb, one of the four LHC experiments. This was a big moment for all the members of the LHCb collaboration, some of which have been hard at work on the experiment for many years. There was much excitement when the first tracks were seen in the VELO sub-detector (see picture from our eLog by Malcolm John).



The LHC accelerator is a complex beast and so it must be coaxed into life slowly, one step at a time. Eventually there will be two proton beams counter-rotating and then colliding in the center of each of the experiments. That is probably several weeks (or months) away. In the mean time, the two proton beams are being injected into the LHC and then dumped on large metal targets after they have passed through LHCb or Alice (one of the other experiments). These beams are of much lower energy than those which will eventually be circulating, but they are still useful for testing both the LHC and LHCb.

Its now 3am and I'm on shift in the LHCb control room. We are waiting for a problem with the accelerator to be sorted out so that we can continue to test the radiation monitoring system. The control room is stuffed full of computers and screens showing all kind of information on the state of both the accelerator and the experiment. I've attached a picture showing the current state of the beam. The beam spot can clearly be seen.



I'm glad I am here at the beginning of running. We all hope that the next few years at CERN will provide lots of interesting discoveries about our world. That feels inspiring, even when stuck in an uncomfortable chair in the middle of the night somewhere close to a hypermarket in France.

I've got a fair few more shifts to do over the next few months, so I will try and post an update on how the commissioning of LHCb comes along.


Update:

The CERN press office has published an article on the tests discussed above. You can find the article here.

I thought, as I'm on night shift again, that I'd add a little explanation of what the picture of the tracks in the Velo actually shows. LHCb has been specifically designed to study the decays of so called B mesons - relatively heavy bound states which include a bottom quark. These systems are an interesting place to look for deviations from the Standard Model and to really test our understanding of nature.

The Bs have a relatively long lifetime and so we can watch them decay after they are produced. The Velo is the LHCb sub-detector designed specially for this task. You can find lots of glossy pictures of it here. It consists of a set of CD sized disks of Silicon which react when charged particles travel through them. The lines shown in the first tracks picture above show the trajectory as a group of particles traveled through the detector. These tracks are made by taking all of the points at which a particle passes through a disk and then trying to draw a line through all of the points. As we are still in the early stages of commissioning, parts of the Velo were switched off, which is why not all of the disks show up as the particles pass through them.

CRUZET3: Cosmic Rays in the CMS Tracker

With only a few months to go before the LHC is scheduled to turn on, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN is making great progress. Months of testing have led to this week's CRUZET3 results; the measurement of the first cosmic rays by the silicon tracker, a part of the apparatus in which Imperial College is heavily involved.

Figure 1. A near cross-section of the CMS experiment – the horizontal line in the middle is the beam-axis. The blue and purple cylinders are the silicon detectors, and the red cylinders are the muon chambers. The fluorescent green line is the reconstructed muon path, and the frog at the bottom is a disinterested observer.

Researchers from Imperial College are currently collaborating with around 3,000 scientists from thirty-eight different countries at the CMS experiment, where protons will collide with each other at practically the speed of light. Before the collisions finally happen, the whole set-up needs to undergo careful testing and re-testing in a process known as commissioning. This has been going on for the better part of the last year, and is slowly but surely approaching completion.

One of the most important things that need to be tested is the ability of the various trackers to register the particles going through them. Muons from cosmic rays are an excellent source of test particles - hundreds pass through our bodies every minute - and are therefore used for testing the various detectors on the CMS.

These tests are collectively referred to as CRUZET – a Cosmic Run at Zero Tesla (i.e. with CMS's large magnet switched off). The first two such tests, which took place in May and June, focused on the outermost sections of the CMS, the muon detectors. CRUZET3, which started on the 7th of July 2008, included the silicon tracker for the first time. This detector consists of ten layers of silicon immediately surrounding the collision, which help to provide a very accurate map of the particles' trajectory.


Figure 2: A view further away from the beam-axis, two of the ten silicon layers are shown in purple, and the relevant panels of the muon chambers are displayed in red. The muon path going through the entire experiment is more distinctly visible.

The complicated part of the operation, however, doesn't stop with the data collection. The work then involves translating the electrical impulses and digital signals coming out of the experiment to the pretty pictures you can see here. Precisely for this purpose, the computer programmers at CERN have designed a highly intricate piece of software known as Iguana. This programme achieves the seemingly impossible; combining particle physics with attractive design. That's one talented amphibian.

A simpler piece of software, Frog, achieves similar results with fewer user options and the 3D models are easier to generate. As you may have guessed by the small image at the bottom left of each of the pictures, Frog was the programme used to generate the images you see here.

The three figures in this article use some of the first data to come out of the CMS; a model of one of the approximately 100,000 muon tracks generated in the twelve hours of CRUZET3. The fluorescent green line is a reconstruction of precisely such a muon track, which, as you can see, went right the way through the experiment without entering the central cylinder. This particular muon, as can be seen from figure 1, just glanced the innermost silicon detectors (in blue), but made both an entrance and an exit from all the outer ones (in purple).

Figure 3: A close-up view of one of the silicon detector cylinders.

Figure 3 provides a less cluttered view of the muon's trajectory – nine of the ten cylinders have been removed, and replaced with the individual panels the muon hit on its journey. Figure 2 shows a 'muon's-eye view' of the experiment, with the green line very clearly going through the internal trackers as well as the outermost muon detectors (in red).

These models are among the first to combine data from the muon detectors with results from the silicon trackers; providing a glimpse into what the experiments later this year may be like. The CRUZET runs are now over, as all the useful experiments at zero Tesla have been run. What remains to be done now are the CRAFTs – Cosmic Runs At Four Tesla. Watch this space!

Article by Gilead Amit (IC) and Tom Whyntie (IC). With thanks to Christophe Delaere (CERN) for his help in constructing the Frog images. Frog was created by Loïc Quertenmont (UC Louvain) and Vincent Roberfroid (UC Louvain).

T2K is Coming Along....

It has been a few years since our group started working on T2K, and as with any experiment, initially there was lots of talking and designing and re-designing, but without very much to show for it all, at least in a form that can be appreciated outside of physics meetings.

But with less than a year to go till we start taking data (which is a scary thought), we now have some photos and videos to prove that T2K construction is right on track!
The picture on the right is something I generated a while ago from the representation of the T2K near detector in the computer simulations that we have been using to design and study it.
The movie shows the magnet coil a week ago, being put inside the red magnet, which has already been placed 20 metres underground in the brand-new detector cavern. All 900 tonnes of the magnet were shipped all the way from CERN just a few months ago. Note the uncanny similarity between the picture and the movie.... The movie is sped up by the way -- the workmen don't actually whizz about like that.
It is a proper experimental hall now, but on the right is how the "cavern" looked when we visited J-PARC 9 months ago in September 2007--barely a scratch on the surface!
The near detector is being built in the ground about 280m from the origin of the neutrino beam that is also undergoing construction, so that we will be able to measure the beam and understand the interaction properties of neutrinos well enough to be able to measure it again at Super-Kamiokande, 295 km away, which is the point of T2K.
The cage-like object rendered in brown in the picture at the top is what we call the "Basket". It sits in the middle of the magnet, and holds up the P0D, FGD, and TPC detectors inside. This was one of the UK responsibilities, and in this picture you can see our colleagues from up North inspecting it when it was finished. Since it goes inside a big magnet, the Basket, and everything else too, needs to be made of non-magnetic materials, and that was one of the things they checked.
I hope it goes without saying that the Basket is not the only thing we are building for T2K in the UK! The Electromagnetic Calorimeter, or ECAL, which the UK is responsible for, is also coming along nicely, as is the neutrino beamline itself. I think I'll save those for another post though....

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.

In the control room

As we haven't had a post for a while, I thought I would write something. As I am sitting in the control room of the D Zero experiment, waiting for the beam to start up again, control room work seems like a good topic.

I will give a brief explanation of what the D Zero experiment is to begin with: I will try to keep the physics quite simple. D Zero is a colliding beam experiment at the Tevatron accelerator on the outskirts of Chicago. The Tevatron accelerates protons (hydrogen nuclei) and anti-protons to a high energy before colliding them. The collisions produce a large amount of energy, which takes the form of subatomic particles. These particles are then detected and analysed by the D Zero detector.

So far, so good. However, you have probably realised that the experiment doesn't work on its own: it needs a team of people to keep it running smoothly. A bit like the Marquess of Bute's wine, the D Zero experiment requires at least four people to be present at all times. These four are the CalMuo shifter (who looks after the calorimetry and the muon system), the Tracking shifter (who looks after the tracker), the DAQ shifter (who looks after data acquisition) and finally the captain, who co-ordinates everyone's efforts. I am trained as a DAQ shifter, so it's my job to make sure that the data is flowing properly.

The D Zero control room is a narrow rectangular room in the basement of the main D Zero building. There are long desks running along each side of the room, with numerous telephones, keyboards, computer mice, pens, wires and bells cluttering their surfaces: this is par for the course in most physics labs. My station is about halfway along the room, and above my desk loom various loudspeakers, whiteboards, soft toys, ringbinders, lists of telephone numbers and ancient post-it notes covered with faded handwriting. It is nine large computer monitors, however, which dominate the space above me. It is my job to watch these, in order to make sure that the experiment is collecting data as expected.

This isn't as difficult as it sounds; essentially I only really care about two screens: one which shows the rate of data flow (I begin to get worried if it shows zero), and one which shows any errors that are affecting the system. The rest will help me to identify any problems the system might have. Usually things can be fixed quite simply, but occasionally the problem is quite complicated. More often than not I will find that I need the help of another shifter to solve things (for example, if the calorimeter has an error, I need to work with the CalMuo shifter to fix it). If it is beyond us, it is time to call in the experts, but I have only had to do that once.

Things get a lot more complicated if someone needs to make repairs (usually to systems close to the detector, but not within it). When the accelerator is inactive, it is safe enough for teams to go into the collision hall to make repairs (there are stringent safety measures in place, of course). Because it is very rare for the accelerator to be off, everyone will come down to the control room at once to work on their particular system. These times require some co-ordination, as everyone needs the system changed in a particular way. Sometimes it can be hard to tell someone far more experienced than you that they have to wait for someone else, but usually someone more authoritative will help me out.

That is the busiest it gets though. Most of the time, the DAQ system is running well and doesn't need much attention. I have been on night shift (midnight to 8am) this week. This has the disadvantage of making me become nocturnal, but it is good in a way because I can chat with my friend in Hong Kong. I have also been playing "Limericks" with a friend in London to pass the time: we write a Limerick one line at a time, taking it turns to come up with the next line. The end results, to be frank, range from poor to absolutely terrible, but it helps pass the time.

Having worked in the control room, I now realise how much work it takes to run a major particle physics experiment. Before I started my PhD, I was under the impression that you turned the thing on, and it just ran, churning out great physics 24/7. I now realise how naive that was. But it makes me wonder about the LHC experiments: D Zero is tiny in comparison with them. They are planning to have hundreds of people operating these experiments at a time: how will they communicate with each other effectively? How can they organise themselves when a problem needs fixing? Do they have procedures to follow for any eventuality worked out in advance? And then there is the sheer size of the detector: when something breaks down, how do they intend to get to it to fix it? So, not only is the LHC a huge technical challenge, it is an enormous logistic and organisational challenge, and it will be interesting to see the solutions they come up with.

Whoops, that was a very long article... congratulations if you got this far! It is hard to say something exciting about something that is essentially quite boring, but at least it gives you an idea of some of the work that we have to do in particle physics.

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...

Ouch, that hurts!

In spite of the somewhat appropriate title, this post is not about what STFC thinks about the LHCb experiment.


While I was searching for some material from my lecture at next week's Master Class I found the picture on the left. It's taken from the first episode of the the Big Bang Theory, a new sitcom now aired on Channel 4. For those who don't know it, it's basically like Friends, just with only nerds.

In the depicted scene (watch it) main character Sheldon supposedly explains some string theory to his neighbour Penny. A closer inspection shows that the white board has little to do with string theory. There's a simple calculation of the decay rate of the top quark to the bottom quark (assuming CKM unitarity) and then two Feynman diagrams of "FCNC" (flavour changing neutral current) top quark radiative decays. Finally there's a partial view of the CKM matrix. This scribble on this nerdy sociopath's white board could actually have been copied from my own white board (I mean, the one in my office). Ouch, that hurts!

The LHCb group at Imperial specialises in FCNC decays (actually of the b quark) as it is a very promising way of indirectly observing new particles too heavy to be accessed directly at a collider. They can hide in the loops shown on the picture (more). Many particles have been "discovered" indirectly this way before being actually produced directly at a collider. The race between direct and indirect will be on again when the LHC turns on.

Petition reaches 17,500 signatures. Thanks for your support!

Just a quick note to thank everyone who signed the online petition calling for government action on the STFC funding crisis. The petition has now closed and yielded an impressive 17,518 signatures. By the end it was one of the top 10 most supported petitions on the site. This is well beyond what any of us hoped for when we started out. Most encouraging was the depth of support from outside the affected fields, from the wider physics community to other areas of science and the general public. The petition attracted support from all levels of science, from the big names to undergraduates, many of whom organised a petition awareness day in physics departments nationwide.

The government's response so far hasn't been very different to the line they have been following throughout the debate "funding has broadly increased but tough decisions had to be made". However, the strength of support for the petition has clearly raised awareness of the consequences of the cuts both inside and outside of government. Hopefully this will help those negotiating to mitigate the damage.

Once again, thank you to everyone who supported the petition and spread the word. We have at the very least shown that science matters to more people than those holding the purse strings in Whitehall could have imagined!

Will

My Postgraduate Students' Physics Grandfather

Postgraduate advisor-advisee relationships often bring up discussions of physics genealogy -- for example the fact that students of my colleague Dave Wark, such as Ian, will share their physics grandfather with me.

Through all the variations such discussions can take, one common question is "what was my physics grandparent like?"

My advisor was Peter Fisher, and I was his first student, and there are lots of things I could say in response (and probably will), but it is not often that you can point to a clip from the Late Night with Conan O'Brien programme to answer the question....

So here he is in all his glory:
NBC Television(in the US), or, slightly more dodgily: A certain google-owned site

Sustainable Physics: SciBooNE's Recycling

Fermilab's daily newsletter, Fermilab Today, has recently published a nice article about SciBooNE. (Read it here!) The article discusses an interesting aspect of our experiment, which is that many of our detector components have been recycled from previous experiments. Our vertex detector (SciBar) and electromagnetic calorimeter (EC) both came to us from Japan where they were used very successfully in the K2K neutrino oscillation experiment. Actually, the EC originally was used in the CHORUS neutrino oscillation experiment at CERN, so it has been recycled twice---very good value for money! The third part of the detector is the muon range detector (MRD) which is made from iron and scintillators originally from the Fermilab hadron spectroscopy experiment E-605. (The photo above shows Joe cleaning some of the scintillators. [Photo courtesy of Fermilab Visual Media Services.]) We also used PMTs from a half dozen or more sources for the MRD. (The photo at left shows Hannah Newfield-Plunkett, an undergrad summer student from Cornell working on sorting out PMTs for the MRD.) We also used electronics for the readout of our PMTs and the data acquisition from the Fermilab equipment pool, PREP. This group at the lab is an enormously valuable resource and we really couldn't have built the experiment so quickly and inexpensively without them. To connect the recycled PMTs to the PREP electronics we also needed to find as many quality cables as possible because they are not cheap! We sorted through many thousands of old cables to find what we could use; they were stored in an old experimental hall which is now a kind of physics graveyard full of lots of old but still valuable and very useful equipment. The photo at right shows Michel Sorel and Joan Catala, both from Valencia University, sorting and testing cables. It was hot and dirty work!

The Fermilab Today article discusses all this work and more, and includes an audio interview with Joe. Check it out!

Petition to reverse recent funding cuts to Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics and Astronomy

Unfortunately my first post to this blog is motivated by difficult times for physics in the UK. As you will doubtless all be aware the UK funding body covering Astronomy, Nuclear and Particle Physics (STFC) has announced severe budgetary reductions affecting each of these fields. It is feared that grants may be cut by up to 25%. This being a particle physics blog I have no doubt that the readers are aware of the specific problems this has caused for our field. However, I wanted to bring home just how many people are affected by this across the broad spectrum of UK contributions to physics, from stellar observatories to power stations. If you share the feelings of many in the community that these changes simply can't go uncontested then please consider signing our petition on the 10 Downing Street website. Hopefully, if enough people sign up, in conjunction with the letter already sent to the government on behalf of the community, we will cause those responsible to think again before they seriously damage the future prospects for physics in the UK. Thanks for your support!

Exciting News from Fermilab

The new combined CDF/DZero Higgs limits were released last Friday. I would give you a URL to the results, except they haven't appeared on the Fermilab website yet.

This is because there is some even more exciting news than that. Here in the States, there is a television show called "NUMB3RS" (catchy title) about mathematicians and theoretical physicists who run around solving crimes. As a physicist who hasn't seen the show, this seems rather unlikely to me, as the last crime I solved was "who stole my orange juice?" Then again, I'm no theorist, so what would I know?

Anyway, according to 'Fermilab Today' (http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/) a recent storyline involves one character (played by Peter MacNicol) considering leaving his exciting life of crime-fighting QFT in order to join the DZero experiment.

That's right, DZero.

The character gives his reasons for joining the experiment, hoping to discover the Higgs boson, concluding "What can be more spiritual?" I have to say, I can think of quite a few things that are more spiritual. In fact, I think I have had more spiritual moments in Bracknell - in BRACKNELL - than I have at DZero.

Don't get me wrong; the work here is rewarding, and I do see the mystery and the wonder of trying to work out why the universe is like it is. However, as the old saying goes, "The nearer the church, the further from God." Once you really get involved, you start to lose sight of the big picture; you get bogged down in all the little details. And besides, once Mr. MacNicol starts using ROOT, I can guarantee he'll feel a lot less spiritual.

Anyway, there are some fairly revealing quotes in the 'Fermilab Today' article. The first is from Darien Wood, the DZero spokesperson:

"We can always use more 'brilliant but socially awkward' physicists to help us find the Higgs"

I choose to paraphrase this as:

"We are so understaffed at DZero, we are willing to hire actors to pretend to be physicists"

Better yet is Alan Stone's reaction:

"In every episode, there is a crime. One can imagine the kind of story line they would need in order to film here (in Fermilab). There's just no possible positive spin."

To me, this seems like an oppurtunity for a great story, not a problem. Consider this: a starry-eyed theorist comes to DZero to find the Higgs. However, after a couple of weeks, he realises the frustrations due to the Object-Oriented graphics and analysis software he has to use. Eventually, he is drven mad, and flies to Switzerland to get revenge on the creator of the software. Then, the other mathematician-detectives come to CERN to investigate the grisly murder: you can just imagine the close up on the lead actor's face as he says: "Well, that's something to narrow this down... whoever did this certainly doesn't like ROOT."

The Rest of Last Week

Sorry for the silence, it has been a while since I had the time to sit down and try to satisfy Patrick's cravings....

---

Tuesday

Get into College by 9am to do 1st Year Lab -- this is one of the 5 days this term that I have to come in so early!

These teaching labs can be as fun or as boring as the students want to make them, but I am impressed by them more often than not, and this group is exceptionally good, and right now they are discussing amongst each other about the experiment and hardly need my help.

Having said that, when asked to measure the index of refraction of a mystery liquid, one of the pairs of students tell me that they got 1.2 -- since a liquid with an index of refraction of 1.2 would be a rather special thing, I ask them what their error on that was, hoping for something like 0.1. Their answer: "we haven't done that yet!"

Over lunch, have a quick look at the previews for tonight's match. We won for the first time in ages on Saturday, and looking forward to it tonight. Our opponents are one of the few teams below us in the division, so we've got to win!

A couple of more tutorials from 2pm. The students will soon be writing an essay on a topic of their choice, so we go through some tips I have on making their writing more interesting. This may come across as profoundly ironic to readers of this blog.

From 4pm, we have our regular T2K Imperial group meeting. This time of year is fun because we usually have a few 4th year students doing their projects in our group, and we treat them as full group members, which means that they give regular reports on their progress like everyone else. Patrick and Paul are working on two separate projects, one on T2K nd280 physics and one on some detailed characteristics of some novel photosensors, and we hope that by February, they'll have answers to a some questions that we don't know yet.

You would have to ask the students themselves if they think it is just as fun for them....

Morgan and Joe are dialling in from Chicago again, which is good because it makes us feel good about being in London over the winter.

The group meetings sometimes run quite late, because they are the best forum for proper discussion (ie grillings), where we sort out misconceptions and disagreement. Today however, I was able to adjourn the meeting quite early, which gives me time to travel down to the stadium and stuff down a nice big serving of jerk pork, before seeing us come back from behind to win.

Now I think about it, this is the first time I've seen us win this season....

Wednesday

Today is one of those special days during the week when I have hardly anything scheduled except time for getting some research done. There is just one meeting, but apart from that, I have hours to get through my todo list at my leisure.

...except something unexpected crops up, and I lose a few hours doing things far removed from unravelling the mysteries of the neutrino sector of our model of the universe. I even had to excuse myself from the one meeting.

I wanted to go home early to pack my bags, or rather my single carry-on back of less than 10kg, but end up returning home at only about midnight. Which sounds fine except that I have to leave for the airport at 4am....


Thursday

This is the day of the second trip mentioned in a previous comment. The flight leaves at 7.30 from Stansted, so I get up at 3 and take the bus up to Liverpool Street Station at 4 and then the Stansted Express.

The flight is not bad at all considering I paid 6 pounds for it, and once we arrive, it only takes about a minute between going down the stairway and walking out of customs into the sun and warmth of Valencia.

The meeting is hosted by the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular of the University of Valencia, and we immediately sit down for lunch which includes tortillas (omelettes), Iberico ham, all sorts of other yummy things, and beer. Having only slept a few hours, and being the sort of person I am, I refrain from touching the golden stuff.

I had scheduled the lunch at 11.30 so that we could have a long afternoon session, but the consequence of that was that the cafeteria had to open early specially for us, sorry!

There are about 15 people present at Valencia, and a similar number dialling in via a teleconference service, from across Europe and North America. We have to juggle the needs of everyone according to their time zones, which often can result in a total mess, but today, after some initial glitches, things go pretty smoothly. The fact that we are having arguments (constructive ones, mind you) over the conferencing system indicates that it is working well. Most of our meetings are teleconference only, but having a core face-to-face location makes things so much more productive.

This meeting is about making sure the software for the T2K nd280 detector is ready to real physics work. The software is the result of the effort of many people across the world, and encapsulates our knowledge of our experiment, so it is a big job to get it done, and to get it done right.

One of the most important items I put in the agenda was "Hot Chocolate and Churros", but for all the IFIC's hospitality, it does seem that was asking for too much!

Instead of specifying an end time for the afternoon session, I thought the best way to get the most out of the day was to continue until a Spanish person told us it was time for dinner. That duly happened at 8.30pm, so we pack up and trek across to the old town, where we indulge in loads of paella, a local speciality. I personally like Paella Valenciana, with chicken and rabbit meat, but today we are having seafood and vegetable paella. Positively yummy.

After dinner most of the group hit the bars and dives for some heroics on the town, but I, being the sort of person that I am, head straight for my hotel for a quiet night's sleep....

Friday

I get up early and walk to the tram stop well in time to make it for the start of the second day at 9.30am, but I wait and wait and no tram comes.

When one finally does arrive, I find that I am on the same tram as all the students who only went to bed just a few hours earlier, and I reschedule the start of the meeting to 10am.

Today's lunch is Paella Valenciana, so I have two platefulls. Yummy.

We continue till about 6.30pm, sorting out what we can do and can't do over the next several weeks and months. We have our work cut out for us, but it will all be worth it in the end!

This is when my week officially ends....

This Week

Since there hasn't been much activity on the blog for a while, I have decided to blog about my week. I hope this will serve as a warning to my colleagues that they should update the blog reasonably frequently!

Anyway, for a detailed account of a "typical" week for a lecturer at Imperial HEP, watch this space (or avoid it, as the case may be...).

---

One of the founding principles of this blog was not to fill it with self-indulgent spewings, but my hand has been forced -- beware:

Sunday

Start the week in a good mood, a big chorizo omelette breakfast in the Portuguese area up the road from me.

I come in after lunchtime, a bit later than I wanted. It seems about a third of the offices down my corridor are occupied. Weekends are good because there is no teaching and fewer people come knocking on my door, although today a certain DZero physicist did come in asking to be rescued because he had locked himself out of his office....

The central event this coming week is a face-to-face meeting (as opposed to the usual teleconferences) that I have convened for the T2K experiment near detector physics software group. Today I am sending out a draft agenda for the meeting. We only have two days but a lot of work to get done, and because some people are dialling who can't travel this week from a variety of time zones, it is going to be quite difficult to arrange the sessions to suit everyone.

I also send out a reminder for some people to submit their sections of a report we are writing. Then I make a mental note to myself that I'd better get on with writing the bit that I am supposed to be responsible for.

I look through the laboratory notebooks of a dozen or so first year undergraduate students. Keeping a decent logbook of everything you do is an important part of a physicist's training, and while some are already amazingly good -- legible and detailed with lots of interesting jottings -- there are one or two where I can't figure what they were thinking. Some harsh words are in order, but then I remind myself about what I was like as a first year student, and hold back a bit....

Before catching the bus home, I continue drafting some recommendation letters that I am writing for a student. There are about 10 undergraduates that I have been tutoring who are graduating this year, so I know I'll be doing a lot of letter writing over the next several months! As far as so-called administrative tasks go, letter writing is something that I feel a sense of responsibility over -- if my wording is somehow off and the letter conveys the wrong impression, it could have a lasting effect on a person's life. One of my students graduated last year and is now studying at one of the very top Institutes in the US, diametrically opposite the one I went to (geographically), which isn't bad, although whether he actually needed any help from me to get in is another matter....


Monday

Get up early, work a bit on the report over a nice cup of tea.

Second year undergraduate tutorials at 11am, mostly about quantum mechanics. Today I am going through the postulates of QM with them, and how the physics concepts like states and measurements are linked to the mathematics, letting you calculate and predict things. In just a few months' time, they'll be able to calculate the behaviour of hydrogen atoms in laser beams and the like. In a couple of years, the lucky ones will have moved on to calculating what happens in particle interactions at a collider, or neutrino interactions with matter!

At Imperial Physics, we do tutorials in groups of about four students. I think this is about right, because for most issues that the students have, they can bounce ideas off each other and work things out on the board and come to the right conclusion, with just a bit of guidance. Any more and I think some students would find it more difficult to participate fully, any fewer and there wouldn't be the student interactions which can work so well.

Have lunch with Dave Wark at the Senior Common Room, where we are joined by a physicist from a different group. The conversation centres on the world economy, the price of CD players, and how much the space station costs.

1st year lab at 2pm. They are measuring the speed of light using a tabletop setup. My job is to wander about, saying "think about the errors, think about the errors...."

Later in the day, I receive some emails from a couple of personal tutees, asking to have chats with me. I sense some more letter writing coming my way. This week is full so I schedule sessions for next week.

In the evening, Dave, the students Ian and Francois and I attend a lecture from the IgNobel people, where some "improbable" research at Imperial are presented. It is good fun, and you can see how introducing the "quirkiest" science is a great way of showing how the scientific method works and why we all do it. The research on camel hydration and brain temperatures left a lasting impression on me.

Afterwards we end up having an extended chat with a certain prominent science journalist. Good science journalism is of course crucial for the public to understand the importance of basic research. We agree that having a good "rubbish-o-meter" is the most important thing for a journalist (although "rubbish" may not have been the exact word that was used). She also writes a lot of obituaries for scientists, and that seems to be bothering Dave somehow....

Travel

I promised Yoshi in front of the entire group that I would make a post to the Blog, so true to my word, here is a first effort.
As you are no doubt aware, the possibilities to conduct a HEP experiment in the UK are nowadays rather limited. Much of the group is involved in experiments which take place overseas. Ideally we send people overseas for an extended period of time, a Long Term Attachment (LTA), which allows them to minimize the effects of travel, and maximize their ability to participate in the experiment they are working on. This arrangment works well, but for some of us it is necessary to be both here and at the experiment at the same time. In some ways this gives us the best of both worlds, but it has the nasty side effect of requiring a lot of travel.
A typical morning for me at Imperial might actually begin at 5am in Geneva. There is flight that leaves before 7am and arrives in London so that I can be at Imperial by 9am. I can say with confidence that there is absolutely no glamour in the "jet-set" lifestyle. But honestly this is a pretty easy commute. 10 years ago when we were setting up the BaBar experiment at SLAC (near San Francisco) I regularly flew between California and London, a commute which can test your endurance, and involved regular resetting of my internal time-zone.
Members of the group are currently working overseas on experiments at Fermilab (near Chicago), SLAC (near San Francisco), CERN (near Geneva), and in Japan. There are some ways in which technology has made it possible to avoid some of the travel. Participating in meetings via telephone/video/internet conference is now much more practical. There are several systems where presentations are posted to a web site, and so particpants can see all the material on their local machines, and then follow and participate in the discussions via the conference call. This works reasonably well for many working meetings, and is used by most members of the group. There are difficulties with this as well due to the spherical nature of the earth, meetings which take place in the evening in Japan are in the morning here, meetings in the evening here are in the morning in California, and so there is actually a rather small window of "working hours" where these conferences can take place without causing one side or another to come in very early, or stay very late. Some times, however, it is just necessary to travel. It isn't yet possible to plug in cables on the telephone, and sometimes you just need to be in the same room as your colleagues or your detector to work through a problem.
I've picked out some of the difficulties of the travel, but it also comes with a lot of benefits. As well as getting to work in some very nice places, one gets the opportunity to work with colleagues from around the world. These interactions are extremely valuable in broadening our work methods and our ways of approaching various problems.
That's it for now, I've got a plane to catch...

Starting Out

It's the start of a new academic year and, for me, it's back in from the cold of the "real world". After 4 years working as a Market Analyst I'm having a great time settling in to a new life as a Postgraduate Student in the Imperial College HEP group. I dare not whisper "PhD Student" yet, as we have to get past year 1 first...

I'm one of 12 new students this year, which is apparently the highest number since 197_. We're an interesting mix of people, with a half-dozen countries represented. In the first term the focus for us is on study, which is especially useful for someone like me who's undergraduate notes are already browning with age. We have started a handful of courses so far, taught by members of the HEP group, and are also free to attend any interesting undergraduate courses; which most of us have been taking advantage of, when our schedules allow.

By the end of November, we're expecting to have been assigned to the projects that will take us through the full 4 years. There’s been a lot of discussion among us students already and a bit of early bribery from some of the staff – thank you for the beers all of you. We’re expecting some more formal presentations over the next few weeks and then we should have a better idea about who we should be buying the beers for.

Because there are so many of us this year, we're not all in the same office but being kept more-or-less together has been a great way to form some promising friendships already. I'd like to invite any of them who reads this to add a comment so we can hopefully give anyone thinking of starting here next year a good idea about what to expect.

How fit is your collaboration?

Social events are an important part of about any scientific conference. Some argue they are even the most important part of the programme as they allow people to get together and discuss in a more relaxed atmosphere than the three minutes question time after the talks. Usually one half-day is reserved for some kind of excursion.

It was no different at the LHCb collaboration week in Saint Nectaire a month ago. On Wednesday afternoon we could choose between (a) a guided tour of six roman churches, (b) a guided visit of a volcano, or (c) climb the Puy-the-Dôme. From the 200 participants, 130 chose option (c), a 500 m climb of the landmark mountain next to Clermont-Ferrand. The organizers counted 3h30 for the hike and told us to hurry up if we didn't want to miss the bus. Actually everybody had reached the summit in much less than two hours. Some of us even made a detour to climb the Puy de Pariou, a small volcano with a nice crater (straight under the blue paraglider on the picture above). We were all quite impressed by how fit the collaboration is! Nobody expected that so many people would choose to climb a mountain between two meetings.

We also elected a new spokesman for the LHCb experiment. After more than 10 years in charge of the design and construction of the LHCb experiment, Tatsuya Nakada will step down as spokesman next year. The new spokesman-elect is Andrey Golutvin, director of ITEP Moscow and co-convener with Ulrik of the rare decays working group. A new era is starting, with a new spokesman and hopefully real data very soon.

HEP vs SPAT football match

It was billed as the battle to see who held sway over football bragging rights in the Physics department. HEP vs. SPAT. There were many volunteers on both sides. The mouth watering clash was six weeks in the making and took place on Thursday last week - 04/10/07...or should have. Thanks to Murphy's law it did not. The SPAT footballing maestros couldn't put their money where their mouth was and pulled out at the worst possible time - the morning of the match. Apparently, a sweeping bout of freshers flu was to blame! Turning disappointment into action, HEP (Ajit, Aaron, Onuora, Tom) decided to go ahead and play. Fortunately, Deltadot (Wen, Mark, Gary, Dave, Reese) was at hand to oblige.



The match, which took place at Hyde Park, ended 7-5 in favour of Deltadot. It was evenly balanced for the first fifteen minutes as both sides probed for an opening. Deltadot finally made the extra-man count to get on the score sheet. The game was evenly poised at 2-1 in favour of Deltadot with both sides missing a few gilt-edged chances. At 7-4 they seemed to be running away with it but HEP pegged them back with uncompromising defence and a goal at the death.

Good job lads!