(no subject)

Our car broke! Somehow the cables connecting the shifter to the transmission fell off, so it's permanently stuck in third gear. More amusingly, this is apparently a common problem, as two french guys in the truck behind us jumped out and seemed to recognize the problem immediately, although they were unfortunately unable to fix it. Hopefully the CERN people will get us a new one. (-:

Yesterday our task here at work was to test 50-odd photomultiplier tubes (PMT's), a rather tedious, albeit necessary, project. A PMT is a vacuum tube with a lens at the front which is coated with some substance with a very low photoelectric work function, so that it tosses off electrons readily when hit by a photon. Then these electrons go through a bunch of stages where they are accelerated and slammed into a high voltage plate, releasing more electrons. The end result is that the signal of a few of photons is amplified exponentially. These things are a staple of particle physics.

After work we went with a bunch of people from this lab to go swimming in Lake Geneva. Then when we got back to CERN I promptly got on the bus to go back to the beach with the summer students for some night swimming / nocturnal exploration of Geneva. It's a pretty nice place at night. Took the 00:17 bus back to CERN.

Chan, one of the other summer students, has a web page with pictures (look under `Switzerland' for now) including pictures of my "birthday".