Week 11: Colmar, France & Montreux, Switzerland

by 6:58 AM
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 10: Bern, Switzerland

by 10:35 AM
Google Photos: https://goo.gl/photos/UkZud5a8YfGTbfPk9

CERN

This week at CERN, I mainly focused on getting down my data reconstruction methods and presented at the ATLAS Upgrades Week! You can find my presentation at this link:


Geneve Light Show
At Geneve University this week a 20 minute light show was displayed on the universities main building. Parts of the show included various scientific elements such as DNA, Molecules and Atoms! Take a look in the Google Photos for more views.

Bern

This week for my trip, I went to Bern! Starting off my day, I went to Einstein's House and was able to see a nice description as to the life of Einstein! After that, I went over to see some the Bern Bear pit which was closed :(. Therefore, I went over to checkout the awesome Natural History Museum in Bern. Once that was done, I went to see another light show in Bern. The Bern light show was a lot more focused on Switzerland and Swiss culture as seen through the pictures of fondue pots, the red cross and other Swiss elements.  

Week 5: Paris, France

by 12:06 AM
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 12:31 AM

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 1: A Geneva Adventure

by 12:33 PM
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.

Day 1

by 3:47 AM


Day 1 

Pre Flight

    My journey started off at JFK airport where I would be traveling via Swiss Air to CERN. First off, the check in process ran smoothly. Even my trip through airport security with all my computer parts ran smoothly, I wasn't stopped,  just passed along to go to my flight. After airport security i had two hours before my flight boarded. Hence, I went for a walk around the endless airport. At one point I had reached the flight observation window, where I saw an A380 for the first time! Now those of you that don't know, an A380 is a giant passenger plane with two levels of seating! It was enormous and warranted a snap to one of my plane loving friends. After sitting and watching planes for an hour, my flight was just about to board. Boarding was one of the weirdest processes i have seen out of all the airlines i have been on. They started with first class, then families with children and finally there was just an all board for all rows. Therefore, this caused a surge to get onto the plane which I wound up on the back of the line :( . 

Flight


    As I began to board, I experienced my first culture shock of the trip. The flight attendant said to me, "Bonsoir." All of a sudden, my brain started racing trying to decode what she had said and tried to mangle a response in French. In the end, my brain just died out and I said, "Thank You." Overall, I was just caught off guard but the transition was interesting to see early in the trip. Now just so everyone knows, I have a very beginner French knowledge. I have been learning French intermittently over the past three months using Duolingo and the Youtube channel learn French with Alexa. Through these two sources, I have a pretty decent reading ability while my ability to speak is still slow.  Back to the flight, in the economy class where I was sitting the aisle consisted of two groups near the windows and one group of four in the middle. I had a window seat. Every seat came with a pillow, blanket, and earbuds.
    Now to takeoff, it was around sundown when our flight went to takeoff. This produced the most stunning views in the sky. After takeoff, about an hour into the flight the first meal was served. The flight staff quickly said all of the options for the dinner. Thanks to Duolingo, I understood one, "la beaouf," which incidentally was what I wanted! The meal was pretty decent for airline food, there was a main course, vegetable, salad, roll, and dessert. Once dinner was finished, the whole plane basically went to sleep. Although, due to my excitement to start work the next day I couldn't sleep, so I just sat and watched a few movies on the in flight entertainment system. After about 2 hours, all the lights came back on the plane and the flight attendants commenced to hand out towlets. Straight after that, breakfast was served consisting of some greek yogurt, croissant and frozen orange juice.  The meal was great! About an hour later, my plane finally landed in the small sized airport of Geneva. To get off the flight rather than most flights I have been on, all the passengers actually walked down stairs to a shuttle bus that brought us to the customs area.

Landed  

    Customs was a smooth process and only had taken about a minute. After that, I got my bag from baggage claim and began searching for my program leader. Looking around, I realized he was right next to me the whole time! He brought us(me and another student from the program) from the airport straight to CERN, since our apartments weren't ready. So, when we got to CERN we stored our luggage in his office and began to go through the registration process. Quick note, on our way to get registered and within 5 minutes of being at CERN we met the director generale of CERN!!! Back to registration, first, we registered with HR to get our Swiss and French card ( Since CERN is in both Switzerland and France employees must have national ids for both countries). Then, we headed over to the badge services to get id cards. Finally, we registered our computing accounts in the IT area. 
     After finishing the whole process above, the group went to go get some lunch at one of the many food venues at CERN. Note, at this point it is like 4AM in the US( time difference of 6 hours) and I barely got any sleep on the plane. So, trying to restore my energy with some food, I got a beautiful plate of calamari, pasta and a vegetable! The meal cost me 8CHF which is basically one to one with the dollar. Once I had finished eating my plate of food, the group drove over to the apartments and I began to unpack. The apartment's quality is comparable to university style dorm apartments. Going to the grocery store was the next adventure to unfold. We walked about 8 minutes to the grocery and when we arrived we knew what nothing said. So, it was an adventure trying to buy little things like laundry detergent or dish soap. Finally, after all that I, went into my bed and hit the hay for the night! 

Up Next: This was only my first day! I have so many more adventures to go over in my first week! 



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