Higgs - The quest for the Holy Grail of physics : the Higgs particle

Particle Physics promo team - here we come!

Yesterday’s big event was the LHC official inauguration, at which I was present to represent CMS to the various delegations. This was a great experience, it is very interesting to meet the people who make decisions about how we are funded and explain (hopefully in a successful way) why the studies we will do at the LHC are essential for the understanding of how nature and the universe work.

It was definitely very tiring, there was a party afterwards for the CERN employees and I did not even go as I was too exhausted from talking to country representatives all day, including the heads of the two major US funding agencies, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. I very much hope I managed to convey how exciting and groundbreaking the research is that we do, anyway I definitely had fun. (more…)

And now - what keeps us busy when there is no beam

Actually if there would have been been collisions now, this probably still would have created some excitement. Currently I am sitting at Geneva airport waiting for my plane to finally leave for Amsterdam. Looking east I see something the average cernoise is always happy to see: First snow on the Jura.

As some of you might be aware, Switzerland and the alpine areas in neighboring France have some of the best skiing in the world. And in winter that’s what I do when not working or sleeping. Seeing the first snow makes me want to put wax on my skis, check that my helmet is still snowboarder-proof and in general gets me in a happy mood. Hmm, maybe I should have started my pre-ski fitness already. Never too late.

Besides that we are happily calibrating the CMS pixel detector to even higher precision. (more…)

Start-up, set-back and survive…

After having been off-line for a while due to a summer-school and other activities, it almost seems impossible to summarize what has happened the last four weeks. We went from being euphoric on September 10^th to a state of just-keep-going after the 19^th . From “first beam in LHC” to “an incident in sector 34”. From writing a thesis with first data to basing my work on simulation? We obviously hope for a quick recovery and trust in the skills of the people working to fix this, but you never know.

I think that the incident (see Freya’s blog for more information) came as a shock to everyone working on the LHC, (more…)