Week 11: Colmar, France & Montreux, Switzerland

Google Photos for this week: https://goo.gl/photos/i3WidZZLbGonNahz5

CERN

This week at CERN the tests with my fiber light guide concluded and our team started testing a new device known as a Falcon. A Falcon is supposed to replace the fiber light guide and solve the problem of matching fibers of the fiber bundle to the fiber light guide. Currently, the fiber light guide does not match 1:1 fiber’s positions. Therefore, one fiber of the fiber light guide could be reading multiple fibers of the fiber bundle. To alleviate this problem the Falcon is going to be used as a sort of magnification device. The Falcon is basically a fiber light guide with miniscule fibers mapping from one size of the fiber light guide to the multi anode PMT. Based on preliminary tests our group found that the Falcon can magnify the bundle to a very good size. Although, we still need to test the optical properties such as light transfer on a multi anode PMT setup.

Colmar

No plan is mind, I went to the SBB station on Friday and asked them for the cheapest ticket to a Christmas market. Four hours later, I was in the magical universe of Colmar, France. Colmar is a beautiful city that was untouched by the world wars. Hence, many of the buildings are still in their original state. Additionally, the whole town has a Christmas theme to it. Everywhere you look buildings are decorated with glittering lights, stuffed penguins/polar bears, elfs and tons of festive red and green colors.

The Christmas Market was one of the coolest things that I have been able to see on my trip. In total there were about 200 stalls selling all different types of goods like chocolate, ornaments and tons more. One cool stall was a carousel setup to be a bar for various drinks, I was able to taste the rich hot chocolate. Additionally, one cool thing about the town was a section known as Petit Venice. Petit Venice is basically a small subsection of the town with a bunch of restaurants by the small canal where people can eat or take a ride on one of the gondolas. Overall, Colmar was an awesome trip and a place I would definitely go back to in the future.

Montreux

After getting back from Colmar Saturday night, I had previously planned a trip to go to Montreux on Sunday. Monteux had another Christmas market and was only about a 40 minute train ride from Geneva. The Christmas market at Montreux was smaller, although it still had amazing little boutique shops. Adding to the magic of the market was the backdrop of the market being one of the Swiss mountains towering over you. At the end of the night, I was able to get some awesome shots after the glare from the sun went away of the mountain. Also at the end of the night, Santa rode in his sleigh across the whole market!

Aside from the Christmas market, I went to see the Chillon Castle. The Chillon Castle was a medium size castle that had tons of rooms to explore. I was able to take an audio tour through the castle’s rooms including: the dining room, living quarters, various courtyards, the keep and overlook. The audio guide was an awesome tour leaving you at the top of the castle with an awesome view of the Montreux shoreline! All in all, this weekend was pretty magical between all the Christmas markets and unique cities.

Week 5: Paris, France

by anthony 12:06 AM abroad blog cern eiffel tower food France fun jet louvre Paris Switzerland

Google Photos Story Link: https://goo.gl/photos/dyXSSy3jJY2nKDep8

CERN

This week at CERN, I spent my time testing the data acquisition system for reading out data from fiber optic cables. I discovered after data analysis that the data has a large amount of noise. Therefore, I attempted to sample the background without fiber optic signals and subtract the mean of the background from my signal as a method of noise reduction. Even after attempting to perform this operation, my signal was not visible. After all of this, I attempted to sample the actual signal straight from the sensor using an oscilloscope. I was able to acquire this and found, very little noise and a clear 1mV signal. Once I had seen this, immediately I knew we just needed a better readout system then what is currently used.

Aside from lab work, this week was Tile week, which is a week devoted to the running, debugging and upgrading of the Tile Calorimeter. I attended almost all the sessions related to upgrades as my project is in the upgrades sector. During the week, I developed one slide for the larger optics feasibility study presentation related to my custom 3D printed fiber coupling scheme. If you would like to take a look at some of the talk this week, including mine, check out: https://indico.cern.ch/event/573823/ (my slide is in the last talk)

Paris

This weekend, I went to Paris for the day! I was able to see the Louvre and the Mondial de l’auto exhibit, check out some short descriptions below:

Louvre

The Louvre was an awesome museum to see! I went to the Dinde section for the majority of time that I was there, which included ancient Roman and Greek work. Additionally, this is the section that included a view of the Mona Lisa. I budgeted myself, four hours for this museum but you can definitely spend days here. After hitting many of the key works I wanted to see in the Dinde section, I immediately speed ran through other key works including Napoleon's apartment, the crown jewels and many more works. I tried to take a few photos here and there, check them out on the google story.

Mondial de l’auto

The Mondial de l’auto is one of the largest auto shows in the world held in Paris. The show featured, 8 different huge exhibition halls filled with many of the latest and greatest cars. I started off at the 1st building and was only able to make it to building 7 by the time the show closed(Spent like 5 hours here). All the show halls were just so amazing, I spent every second admiring the beauty of all of the cars. One interesting part about the show was, concept cars were a large part of some exhibitions. Many of these cars had a dazzling shell, with awesome ideas behind them like fully electric, autonomous driving capability or full body analytics(blinking, head turning, awareness, sleepy, tons more). Another cool part about the show was there was a exhibit hall devoted to movie cars. I was fascinated by all the different cars, I had seen before, such as: Ghostbusters’ car, Jurassic Park’s Jungle car, 007 film cars and many more. I loved this show and would definitely recommend for car enthusiasts to visit.

Tour Montparnasse

The Montparnasse tower was a 59th story panoramic sky view of Paris, conveniently located right near my hotel! Without a doubt, when in Paris, come here. The tower, has a beautiful view from the 59th floor including views of the Eiffel Tower. Now it can get a little cold up there, hence bring a jacket or relax on the heated 56th floor viewing area. Also, if you're hungry or want something to drink there is a nice snack stand on the 56th floor. Back to the view, I was able to see the Eiffel Tower twinkle during its once an hour twinkle, on the top of the hour. I have some really cool pictures here, so check them out!

Geneva

I got back from Paris at 10am, so I still had a large amount of time to tour around Geneva until work tomorrow. Therefore, I finally was able to go and see the UN building in Geneva. The UN building has a pretty cool scene, including a fountain show, the broken chair and row of flags. I'm definitely going to come back for a tour of the building, so check back for a description of that! After that, I saw a sign for a park, which I thought would be a normal little path with some nice fall foliage. I was surprised to find a full botanical garden with a small zoo!

Nature Walk

The botanical gardens are beautiful, they had plants from all different exotic locations. The gardens even had a small little zen garden with a Japanese style setup. Additionally, one side of the gardens there was a zoo with deer, mountain goats, ducks, flamingos and many more animals. While visiting all these locations, I noticed a weird roped off path people kept walking down. I followed this path, and saw a sign detailing that this was a nature walk of the whole Geneva lake shore. I kept following the route, seeing all the beautiful lake views and different gardens of Geneva. This was an awesome little event!

Food

Food in Paris was hands down amazing. The French know how to cook food with fresh and quality ingredients. I had 3 meals in Paris each great! Many times though, I had no clue what I was ordering, therefore what came out of the kitchen was a surprise to me. Quick wrap up of the food that I ate, veal scaloppine, steak?, sauteed potatoes, mushroom sauce pasta, duck, french fries, Nutella crepe and a croissant. Great mix, do come to Paris if you want some quality food.

As for back in Geneva, I went to Domaine de l’orcy(Apple orchard) on Sunday. The orchard was small, although still had some great trees to pick all different types of Apples. Now, I wasn't there for Apples but for Apple cider, my favorite fall time beverage! Sadly, from first sight, all they had was jus de pomme(Apple Juice), which I wound up buying a 5L box. Later when I got home, I discovered my Apple Juice really was Apple Cider! All in all, this week was a great food week with some quality dishes.

Week 3: France/Switzerland Adventure

by anthony 12:31 AM abroad cern food France hiking mountain nyon outdoors Switzerland

Google Story for this week: https://goo.gl/photos/LV1dvfmbZ6CuGLK47

CERN

My 3rd week at CERN went well! First off, I was able to finish a large part of my webserver project. This involved creating various new PHP, Python and Javascript scripts to perform various actions for the physics server. All that is left to do on the project is to implement some routines to parse and sanitize user input. If any one would like to check out the stable version of the site(none of my new features are implemented in this): https://spectrum.web.cern.ch/spectrum/develop/index.html.

As for the work on my tile calorimeter project, this week I didn't get to do much, since the 3D printers were unavailable. Although, I did get to present my work for this project on a live webcast to the University of Michigan sponsors. Here is a link for anyone who would like to learn more about my project:https://indico.cern.ch/event/568524/.

Aside from my projects at CERN, I have forgotten to mention that I am taking a French class at CERN. Every week, I have a 90 minute session with our professeur and we explore the French language! My first week, we went over basics like, “My name is, I am from New York, I am American.” The second week, we went over numbers, details about phone numbers in Switzerland and France and how to ask/give directions. This week was especially useful since, I am constantly in need to find where X place is located. Overall, I have found the classes very fun and useful, allowing me to perfect my French accent!

One last thing at CERN, this week I was able to view the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) control room, AMS experiment and beam test facility. My mentor brought us to all these places and had lengthy explanations about every intricate detail of these rooms. The LHC control room was by far the coolest. Inside the control room, there is about four different workstation areas with over 100 monitors in one workstation. Aside from at the workstation, there are also huge monitors around the room describing all the different LHC parameters such as: power, beam intensity, luminosity, energy and tons more! One of the coolest parts of the LHC was the safety system to start the detector. Just like in movies where you see there are two keys to launch a missile, there is an analogous system here at CERN. Here, there are about 100 keys which are used to go down into the LHC. Now, in order to start the detector all 100 keys must be in their slots to initialize power ramp up for the LHC. After seeing the LHC control room, our group was off to see the AMS experiment. This experiment is actually on the International Space Station(ISS) measuring various cosmic rays. Inside the experiment’s building, there is a small remote control room, a live view of inside the ISS and a replica of the detector on the ISS. One of the cool parts about the remote control room was the experiment had a live event visualizer to highlight cosmic ray paths! After AMS, our group headed to the beam test facility where one of the LHC’s beams is used to test and calibrate new sensor modules. The room where all this is done is massive, to move things about the room there is a huge ceiling crane that scans the room. This experience was awesome, getting to go inside and see so many sensors in their infancy.

European Night

Friday at CERN was European science night. At the event, various documentaries were being shown of physics phenomena, which were developed to appeal to young kids at the event what science is like. Aside from the documentaries, CERN’s globe was opened up for people to walk through the halls. In the globe, there are various pictures of the experiments’ detectors at CERN, particles and a bunch of inspirational quotes. At the bottom of the globe, tours were being offered to see the ATLAS control room and to view the Universe of Particles exhibit. Since I had already been to the ATLAS control room, I went to view the Universe of Particles exhibit. The exhibit was awesome, the room was dark with tons of glowing orbs where various small facts of particle physics were mentioned. Additionally, there was a cosmic ray viewer, that made a flash of light whenever a cosmic ray hit the material! At the end of all this, I got a “New York Hot Dog” from some of the food vendors brought in for the event. The hot dog featured, sausage, pain de maiz, bolognese, cheese and fried onions! The hot dog was pretty good with this unique set of ingredients.

Nyon

Saturday, I visited Nyon, a city in Switzerland. Originally, I had intended to go to Yvoire, which is a French city across the way from Nyon. Although, the weather on Saturday in France/Switzerland was tons of rain. Therefore, I opted for the short 15 minute train ride from Geneva to Lyon, instead of a ferry ride across lake Geneva. Overall, Nyon was a cool small town to visit. During my visit, there was the festival of Nyon which featured various street vendors and artists performing. I spent some time going through the various vendors, awing at the amazing food such as fresh proscuitto, crawfish croquettes and assorted desserts from local bakeries. After searching through all the vendors, I got a pig sandwich! The meat for the sandwich came straight from a pig that was skewered and roasting over an open fire pit! Aside from food, I visited the castle of Lyon and the old city town. The castle featured tons of little crests of Switzerland and a great balcony view over the city. After viewing the castle, I packed up and went back roaming the streets of Geneva for the day!

Mont-Saleve

Sunday, a group of the US students in my CERN program went to climb Mont-Saleve. The route had taken the group about 3 hours to climb up and 2 hours back down. Along the hike, we were able to see tons of cool little things. Such as, the mountain village, we discovered! This village had a little church, school, restaurant and a farmers market for Sunday. Also, many of the buildings had a beautiful antique look which added to the wow factor of the little town. In addition to the village, on the way there we were able to see a cow farm at the top of the mountain! One cool thing about the cows, was they all had the little swiss cow bell on them. After the cow farm, we finally reached the top of the mountain after walking another 10 minutes. The top of the mountain had a beautiful look out over the whole city of Geneva/ parts of France. We were even able to see the spewing water of the jet d’eau from the top of the mountain! All in all, this was an amazing weekend to enjoy the outdoor beauty of Switzerland!

Check back next week for another adventure story!

Week 11: Colmar, France & Montreux, Switzerland

Week 5: Paris, France

CERN

Paris

Louvre

Mondial de l’auto

Tour Montparnasse

Geneva

Nature Walk

Food

Week 3: France/Switzerland Adventure

CERN

European Night

Nyon

Mont-Saleve

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