View this little Google Photos story that I created!
Link:  https://goo.gl/photos/ELQc9vXeDr9Jz1M49


Week 1
   My first week in Switzerland/France was pretty exciting. I didn't really get much time to rest between exploring new sights, working at CERN and a bunch of other things! For now, I am going to list below some highlights from my first week.


CERN
   Working at CERN has been amazing. I am setup in a pretty modern office with most of the essentials to work on my projects. One of my projects involves increasing the spatial resolution of a calorimeter for particle detection. This project is very important because through past experimentation, researchers have found that particle’s’ paths are very close together. Therefore, having fine spatial resolution is important to resolve the different particle’s path.
    For those not familiar, a calorimeter is a device that measures the heat of a particle interaction. Specifically, the process of particle detection occurs when "heat" is transferred by the particles interacting with a scintallator. This scintallator is a material that produces light when a particle strikes it, based on the particle's energy. This occurs due to material ionization. The process above describes how the light signal produced can be used to measure properties of the incoming particle. There are many scintallators in the ATLAS experiment, each with dozens of fibers. Currently, the fibers stemming from the same region  are combined with hardware and read using the same sensor (This process is analogous to a blurry camera, since there is no information about every point at the scintillator, the resolution is bad). The goal of the current project is to read each of these fibers individually, which would increase the spatial resolution of the system by not grouping the fibers together(Hence, you get a camera in the above analogy with better resolution).
  The project has two main tasks: developing a proper hardware implementation for reading each fiber, and developing signal processing algorithms to decrease sensor cross talk.
   Something cool that I was able to do in my first week in the office was being able to see the ATLAS control room. This is the room where all the particle events are first seen and where a lot of the first filtering of data events takes place. The room is sectioned into different workstations, each corresponding to a different sensor within the ATLAS experiment. I will try to post a picture soon of the ATLAS detector, although I have to wait for beam collisions to stop.


Geneva Food
  The food in Geneva has been pretty good thus far. I have been eating in the CERN cafeteria a lot for lunch, and the food is excellent! This week, CERN's cafe featured some excellent meals such as fillet of sole with a passion fruit sauce, salmon, calamari, steak and many more delicious meals.
   But the cafe wasn't the only place I've been eating. I had an awesome kebab in the city! I learned a valuable lesson about the word "kebab" that day: "kebab" doesn't immediately mean shish kebab, because what I got was meat on a nice roll.
   Also, I had some pizza with prosciutto de Parma while here. I have to say, the pizza was above average, although not the best. Being from NY, I have had some amazing pizza, which changes my scale on which I judge pizza restaurants.
  Finally, I went to the Geneva street food festival. It was held in a park with tons of music, lights, and back to back food trucks. The selection ranged from gourmet desserts to hot dog stands. I saw one truck that had a guy carving some prosciutto straight from the block. Uuhhhh...mouth watering. While searching through the trucks, I got a great heap of vanilla gelato! The taste was a little different from that of ice cream in America; it was a lot more creamy with more sugar.


Muséum
  Having no plans whatsoever when going into the city of Geneva, I randomly found a bunch of free museums to explore. The first museum was the Muséum d'histoire naturelle which featured fish, monkeys, spiders, and many more animals. The museum had three floors of exhibits, each better then the next. Near the end of my visit, I found a book about the history of science in French. Since I know a sizable amount about the history of science, it was fun to read over the various discoveries and explore the French language.
   After the Muséum d'histoire naturelle, I began walking through Geneva's street,when I found the Musée d'art et d'histoire When I walked in, the first item I saw was a Rude Goldberg machine. The machine featured a pedal to initiate the machine, which would cause all the motors to spin and tons of sounds to commence. Being an EE major, I went off to the side to look at the wiring, which looked pretty bad. Honestly, if one of the wires fell out of the wiring terminals, there were no labels to put the machine back together. In addition to the Rube Goldberg machine, I was able to see art from the Romans, Egyptians, Greeks and Swiss. Overall, the museum had many cool pieces of work to observe, like historic Swiss military items.


Jet D'Eau
The Jet D'Eau is a giant fountain in the middle of the city which can reach up to 140 meters tall. I was able to get about 20 meters from it, which was an amazing experience. I could see the pump bursting out the water into the sky which would spray down over the city of Geneva.