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!
05 March 2010
First Neutrino Seen at Super-K, 295km from the T2K Beam Origin at J-PARC
11 January 2010
My first few months in Japan
eutrino 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 ver
y 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 wes
t 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 bee
n 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 th
e 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.
06 November 2009
Super-K Sonic Boooom!
(photograph by Nick Ballon)
Well done Tom indeed, but we on T2K are also mixing it up with non-physicists (and artists), in our case in an artist's rendition of Super-Kamiokande, built under London Bridge Station, complete with accompanying sonic booooums....
Super K Sonic Booooum
Nelly Ben Hayoun, sound by Tim Olden
Wed 4 to Sat 14 8pm
Come on a fantastic voyage on a dingy that floats on 50 000 tonnes of extremely pure water where neutrinos interact with electrons in a massive Sonic Boom…Take part on this risky experiment with unique insights from scientists from Imperial College London and Queen Mary University who works with the Neutrino Observatory Super K and T2K in Japan, as SNO in Canada.
www.nellyben.com
This is in the amazing Shunt Lounge, and will be on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th and again from Wednesday 11th till Saturday 14th.
Everyone is welcome, but you need to be there at 8pm for the full experience!
And not only this, but as you can see from the advert:
Scientific Talks at the Sonic Boooum
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Wed 4 to Sat 14
Nov. 4th Dave Wark
Nov. 5th Ryan Terri
Nov. 6th Yoshi Uchida/Melissa George
Nov. 7th Yoshi Uchida/Melissa George
Nov. 11th Matthew Malek
Nov. 12th Ben Still
Nov. 13th Dave Wark
Nov. 14th Francesca De Lodovico
there's a chill-out zone where you can enter the trance-like state that can envelop you when you experience a... physics seminar. Hmmmm....
Photos forthcoming.
01 November 2009
Three Minute Wonders
As the Large Hadron Collider gears up to getting proton collisions before Christmas (fingers - well, pretty much everything, actually - crossed), I'm pleased to announce that my "Three Minute Wonders" will be broadcast this week - Channel 4, Monday and Thursday, both at 12:30pm.
As part of the prize for winning FameLab 2009, I got the chance to turn two of my three minute speeches into Three Minute Wonders with Wall To Wall Television. Directed by Peter Sweasey, "Finding Nothing" looks at why a null result would actually be a tremendous return on a £5 billion investment (based on my final-winning talk, below), while Thursday's episode takes a look at the search for Dark Matter at the CMS experiment.
It's not hard to imagine that the current economic climate will lead to a smaller funding pot for science, and that all areas of research are going to feel the pinch. The field of particle physics is no exception. It is therefore essential that we, as responsible researchers, continue to justify why we're doing what we're doing to the politicians holding the purse-string and the tax-payers who we rely on for our very existence - whether it's showing how technology and expertise are being transferred back into UK industry, inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers, or simply reminding us that projects like the LHC should make us all, as a fellow outreacher Zoe Matthews (Birmingham) beautifully put it, "proud to be human beings". Hopefully films like these, and the work of all those involved in particle physics outreach, will help. I am therefore immensely grateful to NESTA, Channel 4, FameLab, Cheltenham Science Festival, Wall To Wall, Peter Sweasey, the CMS Secretariat, the CERN Press Office and my colleagues in the Imperial CMS group for the fantastic opportunities provided, their much-needed help and (sometimes considerable) understanding of what's involved in making six minutes of television.
Enjoy the films - and let us know what you think!
PS: Once they have been broadcast I think they'll be made available online - I'll try to provide more information when I have it.
17 August 2009
PSI test run
From the 10th of July to the 3rd of August I went to Switzerland to join the Mu2e test run at PSI. The story goes like this..
When I arrived at the airport I bought the tickets for my train that was going to Brugg. I wanted to get the direct train that was leaving in 5 minutes so I started asking people were to go to in order to get the correct train. I find the train (that was ready to depart at that very second) but as I wanted to make sure I was getting the correct one, I asked the ticket collector “Does this go to Brugg?”..with my accent and all it sounded like I was asking for “Prague” and he pointed me at a totally different direction (thank God I realized he couldn’t understand me, I showed him the ticket and he said “Aaaa Brugg, yes this is the train”..Ok, got the correct train...Now what about the bus (and the wrong accent? And the French and German I don’t speak?)... Well, lucky for me, people at Brugg are very friendly and very helpful. This village is small and everyone is very calm and polite (the bus driver doesn’t have a glass that separates him from the passengers-wao!!). I get the right bus, I go to PSI, and I call Peter Winter (the post-doc of UIUC) to tell him that everything is ok etc. A “Peter” answers, he tells me they are just going to get dinner and where should I meet them. When I met him and we introduced, I realized he was Peter Kammel (the head of the experiment and not the post-doc) I was talking on the phone with... Anyway, we get to the dinner place, the nice restaurant of PSI called “OASE” (I still don’t know if it’s initials for something or if it’s from oasis..), I meet the UIUC group I was going to work with: Justine, Chris, Michael, Alex, Greg. They let me know that tomorrow they are going to the supermarket (only one in the area) to get some food for the barbeque they will be having. The barbeque was great, we chopped woods (I liked that a lot :P ), my radiation pad started beeping for no reason, we saw that if I really had that amount of radiation I was going to be dead. After that they started calling me “the source”:P They tell me that the day after they will go for hiking to the Alps. Peter K. turns to me and says “Enjoy these 2 days because not every day is like this, we usually have a lot of work every day”-that’s what they were telling me all the time-and guess what: they were honest..I will talk about it in a second).
Left: Chopping woods, Right: The Mu2e team
The hiking was great!!! Amazing!!! But my stamina was not! I had to follow them (literally, as they were climbing the mountains like it was a straight way... At that point I thought it will be a good idea to quit smoking-then of course I changed my mind).
From the left: Claud, Michael, Chris, me, Alex, Greg getting some minutes of rest
The day after I go to the area we were working at. I meet Haruo from Los Alamos and we started working on the Neutron detector... When they said there was a lot of work, they were not kidding. We were there every day, not only for our shift hours (8-9 hrs) but more than that. And not only because we had to, but because we also wanted to. Being present at a run of an experiment and watching it live, how everything works, is very fascinating! Working on the hardware is something I personally enjoyed: the targets, the detectors, the wires, using the drill. After finishing with the hardware, whenever there was a run, we were no longer allowed to be inside the area. The software begins.. I feel I learned a lot (A LOT!!) in a month just because I was working with these people. We were all in two offices and there was always someone that could help, with the questions, with the code. I liked the organization as well. We were all submitting what we did in an eLog and every day at 5 pm we were having a one hour meeting, saying what our next goal is. Everyone had a new task to do, and that was something I liked. You were doing something and as soon as you were done with it, someone else was using your results to do his work, then you had a new task to do and so on. Work, work, work, but in a very enthusiastic way!
Left: The Vacuum Chamber and the two Neutron Detectors, Right: Inside the Vacuum Chamber, the two Silicon detectors, and in the middle the Aluminum Stopping target.
The tent we used to cover the experimantal setup as the humidity could affect it.
After midnight I was going to get some sleep at the guest house. The best people ever can be found there! Physicists, engineers, chemists from all around the world that were at PSI for a short term as well, were sitting outside the guest house, relaxing next to the fire. Very nice people! The Spanish were cooking Spanish omelette, we drank French wine. Oh, I also met a Greek there with whom we started talking in English before realizing that we speak the same language :P
People from the guest house
One day before my leaving, I went to Geneva to meet my classmates: Ravi, Paul, Pavel, Alex were there and we all together enjoyed the Independence day of Switzerland! I drove Ravi’s car at CERN (hihihi) and they gave me a tour in Geneva. Amazing time!!!!
(From left) Asen, Ravi, me, Pavel and Paul at CERN
This was a very nice experience and I would recommend this to any student!
14 June 2009
The 35th Bubble Chamber Tournament
A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I was woken up at 7am by some of the loudest thunder I had ever heard, and looked outside to see torrential rain banging on the balcony. My first thought was "well that's the end of this year's Bubble Chamber Football Tournament...." Later on I was to learn that many of the tournament participants were greeting by the storm as they were driving down the motorway on the way to London.
As it turned out, by the time we all gathered at the Imperial College sports grounds in Teddington, the sun was out, the sky was blue, the pitches were dry, and 9 out of the 10 teams had arrived, ready to battle it out for the coveted trophy.
I applaud all the teams from making it down from afar in spite of the weather. Sadly, one team was not able to muster up the courage to travel to lovely south west London. Anyway, enough about those losers....
The Imperial College HEP Teams
Imperial fielded two teams, the first, the Golden Generation of first-year PhD students and others led by Simon and Ajit, and the second, led by Jordan our group leader with Julian, a 23-year veteran of Bubble Chamber tournaments, in goal, and me wandering about not doing much on the left.
Here is some match action, with Ajit doing something highly technical with his right foot:
and Manchester 1 defending against Liverpool (well, a ringer from Queen Mary, rather):
Imperial 1 and Manchester 1 made it to the semi-finals, but lost to Birmingham and Liverpool (+QM) respectively, who fought it out in the final:
So here are this year's results:
Winners: Birmingham
Runners-up: Liverpool (+ Queen Mary)
Troll: Oxford 2
Biggest Losers: UCL for being put off by a spot of rain
The triumphant Birmingham team:
and the trophy presentation at the pub down by the Thames:
We think Birmingham agreed to host next year's competition -- so see you all there for the 36th Bubble Chamber tournament!!
02 June 2009
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.
08 May 2009
Bubble Chamber Football Tourmament
hosted by Imperial College High Energy Physics
7 June at the Imperial Sports Grounds at Teddington
all are welcome, as players or as supporters
See Simon Jolly's Bubble Chamber Tournament Home Page
(http://www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/~jolly/bcc/)
31 March 2009
First Observation of CERN and Fondue
Hi, It's been suggested that I write a blog about my first trip to CERN and my first taste of fondue (actually it is because otherwise Patrick Koppenburg et al threatened to hold us hostage in a US army base "somewhere in Cuba" whilst forcing us to listen to David Gray's Babylon at full volume in an sensory deprivation cell - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7488498.stm). So here goes...
I Arrived on 15th March with fellow first year PhD student Paul (aka The Machine) Schaack for a software and Flavour Physics week for LHCb. The view from the plane of the mountains and stuff was cool, but don't arrive on an empty stomach to CERN on a Sunday night! Monday was full of software lectures and got to meet the rest of the Imperial LHCb crew: Tom, Will, Fatima and Chris. They were very nice and helpful in showing us around during the week.
Tuesday night the crew (with addition of Ulrik, Patrick and others) took us out to Geneva for a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant (Kinh Do?) and a bar afterwards. The buses run precisely on time and the streets are eerily clean and quiet, quite a change from London.
Wednesday we had not much to do so we, along with our first year comrades on CMS (Mike, Zoe and Robin), went to Geneva again to check out our future accommodation and had dinner at an Italian restaurant. Oh yeah, during the day we were fortunate enough to see the LHCb detector, which is situated 100m underground. It was big.
Thursday, fondue day. Went again to Geneva with the LHCb crew to a fondue place recommended by Patrick's mother-in-law. The place and the waiters were typically "Swiss-French", but the fondue was an experience... The taste was good but it was seriously filling(!) Luckily we received a health and safety introduction on how to eat fondue by Patrick before the meal and so we safely avoided the dangers of eating fondue... Still had room for an awesome dessert though (there's always room!).
Seeing as in a month or so's time we will be moving there for a long term attachment it was helpful to have had a taster of CERN and Geneva. Personally the place will take some getting used to: the food, the language, the orderliness, the sheer number density of beards at CERN, etc.. but also the prospect of living in a different country, winter skiing and stuff will be great. I am looking forward to it either ways.
Peace out,
Ravi & Paul
20 February 2009
Ten Days of Neutrino Interactions in the Polish Countryside.
My journey started in the early hours of a cold Sunday morning on the 1st February as I made my way to Stanstead airport for my 6 am flight. I was bound for Wroclaw international airport in the south east region of Poland and I was on my way to the 45th Karpacz Winter School organised by the university of Wroclaw. I had left in the nick of time (depending on your perspective) as the next day the UK was enveloped in the biggest snow storm in 18 years and many flights were canceled. This year the focus of the school was the modeling of neutrino interactions, an elusive type of particle with almost no mass and which only interact through the weak force.
Before I talk about the school and the wonders of Poland (Including lots of physics, lots of snow, some caves, and maybe even a wolf!) I should provide some background as to why I was there. I am a second year PhD student on the T2K long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, I will skip the summary of the experiment as there are a numerous blogs that have already done this. The modeling of neutrino interactions, in particular with large composite objects like nuclei, is highly relevant for T2K and
other neutrino experiments as the only way to detect a neutrino is via its interaction with a nucleus present in the large detectors built to capture them. In order to make the kind of precision measurements that T2K aims to make it is necessary to know the energy and type of neutrino that has interacted within your detector and, as I found out, getting this right is very dependent on the models you choose to describe the interaction. It is this driving force from the new era of high precision measurements that has caused renewed interest in the field of neutrino interactions.
The aim of the school was to provide lectures on the current and future developments for the theoretical models that describe neutrino interactions alongside the approximations adopted in the various Monte Carlo generators. The Monte Carlo generators are the computer simulations that start the process of taking these theoretical models and making predictions about what will be seen in the experiment. There was also an emphasis on the current experimental activity in neutrino physics, many of these lectures (very good and useful - I would recommend them to any new students on T2K) were given by our very own Dr Morgan Wascko. For me this highlights the best part of the school which was that there was a healthy mix of theorists and experimentalists. Over the 10 days I feel there was a lot of constructive communication and clarification of ideas and requirements between the two groups.
The school lasted for six days and was followed by a three day workshop. The schedule was intense. Days were divided between lectures, theory exercises, Monte Carlo generator workshops, more lectures, and not to forget breaks in which people could explore the local countryside or go skiing. We started at 8.45 am and on many occasions people were still working at 10 or 11 in the evening.
There were many other things to do alongside the Physics. On the Sunday between the school and the workshop a trip was organised to go by coach to the Czech Republic to visit some famous caves in the Moravsky Kras region. They were limestone caves and were famous for the interesting shapes cut into the rock by the many thousands of years of water erosion (not actually erosion as they were limestone so the water dissolves the rock). I have uploaded a picture of the magnificent stalactites and stalagmites that surrounded us in the caves.
Unfortunately I was unable to go on the skiing trips due to a lack of equipment (I am quite tall and they only had little ski boots) and so I was forced to find other ways to explore the local surroundings. On one occasion me and a fellow T2K student went on an expedition up a local mountain (a hill technically but a very steep one at that). It had just snowed fairly heavily and the slope was very steep and slippery. It took us about half an hour to get to the top and on our way up we kept seeing similar sets of tracks in the otherwise undisturbed snow. The hill was wooded but at the top opened up into a very beautiful space bordered by woods. We kept seeing more of the tracks 
which were all headed to one part of the woods and managed to convince ourselves that they must be wolf tracks (This was for a number of reasons: 1 - There are wolves in Poland. 2 - The tracks implied a large animal with padded and clawed feel. 3 - It was snowing and we were in the woods. 4 - I have an abject fear of wolves). On our return down the hill we couldn't quite shake the feeling that we were being watched! See the image of the tracks on the right.
All in all I had a very productive and enjoyable time at the school and am very grateful to the organisers of the school who provided me with a grant that allowed me to attend.
27 January 2009
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!
13 January 2009
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....
22 October 2008
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 laur
eates 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.
09 October 2008
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.
28 September 2008
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...
