So I spent the first week I was in Europe in Bern with my supervisor, attending ATLAS Overview Week in Bern. I've told you that Bern was very quiet on Sunday and that the conference was tiring with all the talks and the socialising on top of jet lag and a cold, but I haven't said what I actually learnt at the conference or anything we actually did.
Collaboration weeks are there for people to present what they have done and for other people to see what other people have done. The talks should be fairly general and understandable by the whole collaboration, not just the people in your working group. This particular ATLAS Week also had an extra component, being the last one before the LHC startup, each of the presentations was also supposed to talk about readiness for first data and what will be done this year. I think it was good that there was this extra focus to all the talks, I found that I understood a lot more of what was going on compared to last year. First there were the sub detector talks, installation and commissioning, then there were the computing talks, databases, grid and reconstruction, as well as trigger talks. Then there was some administration, followed by the combined performance and physics talks. Most of the hardware based talks spoke about what was ready, what the problems were and what was going to be done about them. It's quite worrying hearing about these actually, the issues with the heating and cooling of the inner detector, and with the toroidal magnetic field, but there are good people working on them and hopefully things will go well. The software based talks were a little harder to understand, but it seems that the hardware is in place, there just needs to be a lot of work in cleaning up the software, which is an acknowledged mess, being too slow and taking up too much memory. There have been a lot of changed recently to fix some of these issues, but changes this close to turn on mean that people need to work very hard on validation and monitoring. The physics based talks were of course more optimistic, with people showing what results they can can from very little collision data and even from non-collision data. For those interested in any of these presentation, they can all be found online here.
Actually, there was an interesting out of field talk on Monday, given by one of the researchers in the climate change group at Bern. His group seems to work on simulations of temperature and resource change due to changes to gas concentrations. His group contributes to the United Nations reports on the same topic, and the findings are pretty bleak. It was nice actually to see a scientifically based presentation on climate change, rather than the more political or economic or emotive presentations one usually finds in the media. Of course, there were still a couple of shock value images in the talk, such as an image of one of Switzerland's greatest glaciers becoming a lake, but there were also a lot of facts, which were stated with the reasonings and theories behind them, which is a nice change. If you have time and are interested, I would check out that presentation. It's the first one after the introduction on Monday morning.
So that was the scientific program of ATLAS Week, there was also a social activity planned each night. The first as a reception in the town hall of Bern, which is an impressive wood and stone building dating hundreds of years. What amazed me where that the huge wood beams in the ceiling were the originals, they hadn't rot and needed replacement. The people serving us were also wearing traditional Swiss outfits, which was a nice touch, though the food wasn't very good, too buttery for my tastes. The second night we went to the museum, where we had a talk about Einstein and got to look at an exhibition about him. This was fairly nice, but there were too many people around to really enjoy it properly. Bern is actually where Einstein was working as a clerk in the patent office where came up with and wrote his famous papers. The third was cocktails in the Paul Klee museum, which was nice, though the whole exhibition which we had a tour of was by one artist, so there were many not as good pieces intermixed with the good. It was amazing to hear the enthusiasm of the guides towards an artist which most of us had never heard of. The final social event was the conference dinner, which was held in one of the banquet rooms of the casino, a room set up for dinner concerts, with all the tables around a stage. The food wasn't so great, with strange smelling salmon, one ravioli in the soup, a steak that had no taste and a dessert which was way too sweet, even for me, but the view from the area outside the room was amazing.
So that was a quick summary of the week and here are some of of the photos which I took during that time:
Legend has it that Berthold V of Zähringen named the Bern after the first animal killed during a hunt when the city was founded in 1191 and so today remains the bear pits from a hundred years ago, which currently only host this one bear. I felt so sorry for the little guy, having to live in such an enclosure, all concrete, with a couple of trees and a pool of green water, and people throwing food down at you all day. Luckily though, supposedly they are building a more animal friendly enclosure, due to multiple complaints by animal rights groups.
I took one of the administration sessions off and headed to a hill overlooking the town, where I ran into this wonder of children's play equipment. I wish it wasn't school holidays I could have had a turn on it. If you can't tell what it is, it's a mini-machine, where you have to work to get a ball through the whole thing, turning handles connected to chains and gears or spirals, walking on steps which were connected to a basic elevator, or balancing a table to move the ball from one set of rails to another. It looked like so much fun and I sat there for quite a while trying to follow the path of a ball through the equipment, but it was too hard just visualising it compared to just doing it. It was actually quite interesting watching the children play actually, some of them understand what was going on, and were slowly, patiently working their ball through the whole apparatus, while others just wanted to watch and do what they found interesting.
Here is the view form the look out, which I walked to, after dragging myself away from the play equipment above. The view is gorgeous, with the farmland in the front and the mountains just visible towards the back.
As beautiful as the view from the lookout was, I think this overshadows it. The city and the river in the foreground, with the hill, and the mountains in the background, was magnificent, and such a splendid backdrop for our conference dinner. Incidentally, I took both of the above photos in panoramic mode on my camera and stitched them up on my computer, using a program called Calico. Cool, isn't it? Though you can see it had some issues with colours in the last photo...
This isn't such a pretty photo, but I thought I'd include as it as I've completely forgotten to mention it so far, the ATLAS soccer match, where people going to the conference could sign up to play and as fairly amusing to watch, though people were given noise makers beforehand, so I had to sit far away from other people to avoid a headache. This is the pre-match photo. People started off energetic, but tired fairly quickly, and one of the coaches was more excited than the other, which enthused his team and they ended up wining, though supposedly they also were lucky in their draw of players, according to players form the other team.
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