Studious Me!

So here I am in this photo in the FermiLab Today accommpanying an article about the summer school I went to there last month. I got interviewed for the article as well, but obviously I didn't say what they wanted me to say, and so wasn't quoted. I'm just glad that the photo was taken early during the school, when I was still all studious and didn't have my laptop open during talks. *relieved sigh*

The End (of School) is Nigh...

So tomorrow will be the last day of the summer school and to be honest, most people are are a little physics-ed out. This is particularly evident in the discussion sessions, which aren't nearly as lively as they were last week. I think having the day off on Sunday reminded us all that we were in the foreign country and stuck in lectures all day. Personally, I've found it much harder to concentrate this week than last week and have resorted to using my laptop during lectures to keep me warm and awake.

Today was much easier than the previous days though, as we only had two lectures, followed by an excursion to the Addler Planetarium in Chicago, followed by dinner at the University of Chicago.

So we were buses out to the planetarium, where we saw two shows at had some time to roam about the place. The shows were a little disappointing; the first showing off 3D visualisations which were cool, but nothing special, and the second was a planetarium show about the different types of collisions in the universe, which was interesting, but because it was in the planetarium theatre, and with the reclining seats, I fell asleep. They also didn't do the customary thing of showing us the stars beforehand which I wanted to hear since I don't know the stars in this hemisphere that well. The displays in the planetarium were kind of cool, they had quite a view hands-on exhibits, the coolest being a model Mars Rover which you could remote control behind a wall, only using input from a camera mounted on the front of it. The only issue was that there were lots of kids around hogging all the exhibits. It must be school holidays here or something. The view from outside the museum back towards Chicago was amazing despite the weather though:



After the planetarium we went to the university, and had to sit through a talk about the physics department there. It was followed by a talk about cosmology, which would have been quite interesting, apart from the fact that the seats were uncomfortable, the room was humid and I had had a week of physics beforehand. Then are was the school dinner, which was also a bit of a let down as it was a buffet, but I guess this was a school, not a conference and it has basically all been free for me, so I really can't complain.

Steak Fry?

Today I learnt that 'Steak Fry' equals 'BBQ' but with different meat and bread (steak and baguette versus hamburger/hotdogs and buns). Oh, and there are bandannas at a steak fry. I think we were supposed to use them as serviettes since they came wrapped around our knifes and forks, but that seemed like a waste, so we all decided to wear them instead:





Note all the different ways that we found to wear a square piece of material and I also want to acknowledge that the above photos weren't taken using my camera, but by one of the British students.

The Third-Most Populous City in the US of A

Coming from Switzerland, Chicago and Illinois are a bit of a shock to the system. It is amazingly flat here. Not a mountain or high hill to be seen anywhere.It was kind of surreal flying in last week, flying down from Canada, down the massive Lake Michigan and then all of a sudden, there were skyscrapers on the edge of the lake then urban sprawl. America is also a bit of a shock to the system. The huge cars and roads here really can't be found anywhere else in the world.

Today we finally got the day off and they provided buses to and from Chicago for us to explore the city which is just visible on the horizon from FermiLab. It is interesting to note that it is ranked as the third mot populous city in the country, it only has 3 million people within the bounds of the city, which is less than Sydney's 4.2 million people and actually less then Melbourne's 3.8 million people. It must have something to do with how the bounds of a city are defined.

Working around the downtown area, you feel so small as the buildings are so tall, and it's actually quite pleasant to walk around as they always provide shade. The levels of the city are also kind of crazy, with one of the streets having three levels. A walkway at the river level, an upper boulevard and a lower roadway. As well as the multilevel streets, there are also supposedly multitude of tunnels under the city, for the subway, for water supply, old freight and supply tunnels, now used for utility and communication lines.

Other facts I found interesting about the city is the canal that was built so that the sewerage of the city via the Chicago River wouldn't flow in their water supply being Lake Michigan. There was already a canal there for shipping, but they deepened it so that it would be lower than the lake so water from the North branch of the river would go to the canal instead of to the lake. So now the treated sewerage goes down to St Louis rather than out to the lake and they can deal with it. The other towns around the lake weren't too impressed with this, worried that the canal would take too much water from the lake, Chicago then built a lagoon and lock system to restrict water flow.

Anyway, enough about the city and my impressions and onto what we did. We first walked around to look for a cruise company office to buy tickets for a cruise around sunset. Then we walked along the river to the Sears Tower to go to the observation deck on the 103rd floor. Sears Tower was once the tallest building in the world, and they still claim to be if you include the two television antennae on the top. It was built in the 1970s in only 3 years and is designed like a set of tubes, all starting at the base and only one goes the highest. Supposedly on a clear day you can see to 4 different states.



As you can see from this photo, it wasn't perfectly clear by the time we got up to the SkyDeck, but the view was still magnificent. Lots of tall buildings and the Lake looking eastwards, and flat land as far as the eye could see westwards. It was also very cool as there was an Air and Water Show on in Chicago that day, and we could see the planes from the deck. I've always found it strange viewing foreign cities from above as I don't know many of the landmarks to look at, but it's cool to be that high up in a building. It was very very full of people though.

After coming down, we went in search of Pizzeria Uno/Pizzeria Due for the original Deep Dish Chicago style pizza. We found the restaurant eventually, with the help of a mobile phone equipped with Internet and GPS, ordered an individual pizza each, and waited. Deep dish pizza seems to take longer to cook than ordinary pizza due to the thickness of the crust and filling, it's kind of like eating a pizza flavoured pie, particularly since the sauce is on top and the filling on the inside, so it doesn't dry out. It was very tasty, though I wasn't able to finish it.

By this time, we were tired and it was over 30 degrees out, so we walked the main shopping street in town, stopping at the Apple store, to the Hancock Tower, then out to the lakefront, where we were going to swim, until we saw the rubbish in the water and all the people there. So we just went to the park at the start of Navy Pier and rested. While we were there, we saw this little guy pop out of the bushes, hop around and eat grass. He wasn't scared of us at all.



Then it was time for our cruise. First we went around the Chicago River, with the guide pointing out the interesting buildings and explaining their history. There are a couple of ones I remember, but I won't bore you all with it here. The most interesting one, engineering wise, is the Boeing Headquarters, which the train lines run below, meaning that they weren't allowed to put columns down to the bedrock, so instead a whole wing for the building is supported from above by steel trusses, which looks very disturbing from the lower river level.



The boat then headed out towards the lake, after going through the lock system. And I look about 20 skyline/sunset photos, of which is one. I also learn about what changing the ISO on the camera does, which I used in the next photo.



This Cloud Gate sculpture was the first and last stop of the day, which is just a huge reflective jelly bean, which somebody must have to clean everyday and also stop pigeons from leaving white matter on it. It looks very cool on the inside, with the warping of the reflective surface and making interesting images. I have heaps of photos of this as well, but this is one of my favourites, with the lights and curved buildings.

A Working Collider

Today we only had three lectures and got the afternoon 'off' to go on organised tours around the FermiLab facilities. Which sounds more interesting than it actually was, because their collider is actually running, it's not possible to see the beampipe in the tunnel or the experiments in their caverns. But it was still pretty cool seeing the control rooms, as well as the LINAC and new computing center, though I am disappointed we didn't get to see the neutrino experiments.



So here is a photo of the control room, they had just finished injecting a store of protons and antiprotons into the Tevatron, so things were changing on the display screens. I felt kind of bad taking photos since there were people in there, but it's cool with all the different screens, all showing different monitoring plots. If you want to see the live status of the machine, it is up on the web here.



This is a photo from the D0 control room, where you can see the changes in technology in computer screens, and things happening in their detector. The D0 detector is like a smaller version of the ATLAS detector, it also has an inner solenoid and an outer toriodal magnetic field, though theirs is solid iron rather than air-core. It also has a liquid argon colorimeter. But both the CDF and D0 detectors are so much smaller, as is the Tevatron. The Tevatron only accelerates protons and antiprotons to 1TeV, so their ring is much smaller - 1km in radius and only about 7m underground. The detectors are about half the size of ATLAS, and were built in halls next to the ring and slid into place. So now all you can see is empty halls, which isn't so interesting, though CDF does have a life size poster of their detector there. For live events from either detector go here.



If you recognise this little guy, I pronounce you a nerd. He's the tape robot for one of their grid storage systems in their grid computing centre, which is a new centre built to handle the processing and storage which now doesn't fit into their original Feynmann computing centre. I include him as robots are cool. *grins* Actually, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but the computing centre was kind of cool, with the different rooms for the different purposes, storage, networking, power and processing.

Learning?

Yesterday I spoke about almost everything except for what I have learnt at this summer school, so today I thought I would mention some of the things which I have learnt / heard over the past few days:

We had Trigger & DAQ talks given by the head of the CMS trigger, and it was quite interesting to hear what they were doing. I like their two level system, which seems more flexible than the ATLAS one, and also how they are going to add storage, so they can save events underground before sending them out to offline computing since the machine won't be running for long periods of time at the start. Their electron trigger is quite a bit more complicated than ATLAS though, since their calorimeters are inside their solenoid, meaning the energy deposits are asymetric and have strange shapes. They are also implementing a pseudo-RoI approach to reduce the amount of data they need to unpack, which I didn't realise they were doing.

"There are many physicists in the world... but not so many good ones" - Guido Atarelli, of the DLAP QCD evolution equation. His lectures and discussion sessions have been fairly interesting due to his way of putting things. He has been giving the theoretical introduction for the school, lying the basics for the more detailed lectures on the various areas. He has also mentioned a few discrepancies between experiment and theory which I didn't know about before, though the differences are only about 3 sigma.

I have also heard a fair bit about QCD, but I don't know how much I have acutlaly learnt from those lectures, since most the of the content is new to me, and I find it hard to follow theory from lectures without the follow up exercises and reading.

We also had a Computing talk by a person high up in CMS computing, in which I learnt that CMS doesn't have the same Tier 2 cloud structure around the Tier 1s. Theoretically, each of their Tier 2s should be connected to each of their Tier 1s, though in reality, this isn't true, but it only matters for raw data, since each of the Tier 1s should have a full copy of all the analysis level data, though this won't be true for first data.


This is the FermiLab logo. Weird looking isn't it? Today I learnt that it's a schematic of a quadrupole superimposed on a dipole magnet as the Tevatron here was the first synchrotron to use quadrupole magnets in a FODO lattice to focus the beam instead of extended aperture dipoles.

I got the answer for a question I've been pondering for a while, which is, how the proton beams in the LHC will pass each other in the single beam pipes in the experiments when not colliding. And it's complicated trajectory which allows them to pass each other without colliding, made by not turning on the focusing magnets. I guess I should have realised that this was possible, since other machines only have one beam pipe all the way around, like the Tevatron, and they can manipulate the beams there to only collide when they want it.

Hadron Collider Physics Summer School

So I've been overwhelmed with information for the past couple of days at the CERN-FermiLab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. We have up to 5 lectures a day, each an hour long with 15 minutes for questions, and there is a lot of material covered in each of them. I've been okay so far on the experimental side of things, since they have been discussing things that I have some experience in - trigger, calorimetry and computing, but I have been getting lost in the Standard Model and QCD lectures.

The day starts at 9am and we have discussion sessions until 9pm, which is very tiring. It is also very unhealthy, since we are given sweets and coffee twice a day and eat lunch and dinner from the cafeteria 20 metres from the lecture room, so we don't move very much. We even get shuttle bused to and from the hotel to the hall on yellow school buses!



Luckily, my hotel has a pool, which I have been using since I have been waking up way too early due to jetlag. We also when for a walk yesterday lunchtime to see the FermiLab bison herd, which is much cooler than the CERN sheep.



Actually, FermiLab has a very different vibe to CERN. It is an hours drive west of Chicago, in the countryside, so there is not much to do close by. The grounds of the laboratory are much larger, though very empty, so instead of buildings everywhere, there is Wilson Hall, then the experimental halls, and empty land - prairie, wetlands and forest. There is less people working here, and you can tell that you are in States and Europe, and not just from the language. Firstly, the whole place is kept at a ridiculously low temperature thanks to the air-conditioning. Secondly, none of the windows in the whole building can be opened, which I guess is part of the design, but still, no fresh air in the whole building is strange. Thirdly, there is an overuse of packaging and polystyrene in the cafeteria. There really is no need for polystyrene bowls and cups when there is real cutlery and plates which need to be washed. It is also very American to have a 15 level building in the middle of what is essentially a field. It has been cool to come out here and see what it is like though.