particle man, doing the things a particle can

first day of work... Liz (dossier: Harvard, Physics and Chemistry; math, languages, hiking, reading, sketching, playing music) and I met our advisor, a lively white-bearded character who's thoroughly addicted to espresso (well, not unusually so, I suppose). Our work environment is another CERN site (entirely in France) where a proton beam emerges from the subterranian apparatus, impacts some kind of target, and sends a collimated spray of protons, pions, and assorted other hadrons into our building. After travelling through a bunch of stuff (instruments, etc) the beam is eventually stopped (we hope...) by a few meters of concrete, beyond which you will find Liz and I fiddling with a huge pile of phototubes for the CMS Hadron Calorimeter. I think our advisor will be great, but it looks like the work will be a combination of a highly educational, coherent project (playing with phototubes and hadrons!) combined with a bunch of cheap labor (soldering new components into phototube controllers... bleh). I suppose we'll see. Anyway, we're willing to forgive a lot of tedious labor because he got us a van. No, I don't understand either, but today they gave Liz and I a Citroen Berlingo, a van contraption (and marvel of French engineering!) to drive around as we please. Now we're simultaneously the most popular and the most despised summer students ever... (-:

I guess I'll say a bit about hadrons. Hadrons are all the particles composed of quarks, and include the familiar proton and neutron plus lots of other more exotic particles. (Electrons, on the other hand, belong to the category of particles called leptons, which are, like quarks, fundamental particles, not made of anything simpler, as far as we know.) So, normal matter is composed of some hadrons in the nucleus (protons and neutrons) plus a cloud of electrons. The particular piece of equipment that we are working with is the Hadron Calorimeter for a project called CMS which is part of the larger project at CERN called LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. What a calorimeter does is to measure the energy of particles that enter it; it does this by absorbing the particles and measuring the energy of whatever they turn into. There is also an electron calorimeter which measures the energy of incident electrons (and muons and tauons, as far as I know, which are basically heavier versions of the electron). I suppose that's enough physics for this post. Basically, a calorimeter measures the energy of something.

I guess the other noteworthy thing that happened today is that it was our first gathering at the infamous Charly's, a bar of sorts with lots of outdoor seating in nearby St. Genis (Saw-Gen'ee). It was pretty anti-climatic considering all the press the Charly's gatherings have gotten over the years, but I suppose it was amusing. Kenny, Michelle, Shannon, Chan, Aras, and I ended up sitting on the ground just outside the place with our own bottle of wine and had a pretty amusing time (well, I think so. I also think that the other summer students think that I am crazy). Biked back to Building 38 ("home") then wandered over to the Cafeteria (where there are these computers)... and here I am!)

Oh yeah, there is also some kind of American group eating in the larval stages, and Liz and I made a successful reconaissance expedition to the grocery store ("Champion") in France. Although novel the experience was still a bit underwhelming (except for the discovery of EUR 2.50 bottles of wine) and we intend to check out the grocery store down the street towards Geneva tomorrow.

(no subject)

annoyingly, LiveJournal isn't letting me edit entries at the moment, so here are a few modifications to the previous entry to be implemented later:

- for anyone who is afraid to stand near a microwave oven, or use a mobile telephone, this is the wrong place to work. our workplace is full of flashing "Danger: Radiation!" signs, and the superconducting magnet nearby warps all the computer CRT's into funny shapes and colors. Time to put on those tinfoil hats and ferrous underwear...

- at Charly's the Swedish guy joined our little group which I found highly entertaining. He called me on my perpetuation of various stereotypes, however, concerning the Swedes, such as the nationwide habit of making bootleg vodka. I did, however, feel vindicated when he admitted the he himself had tried to set up a distillery. (-:

well, I forget what else I was going to write, and it's time to go to sleep...