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.
Google Story: https://goo.gl/photos/fd1ADdcmQqHu2ESk7
I was able to try a fair amount of different food in Greece. First, I had a pork gyro my first night with ham and cheese croquettes. Both were amazing with a very nice flavor. Additionally, I had some lamb and lemon potatoes for lunch the next day. After for dinner, I had the Greeks version of lasagna without pasta but with eggplant in replacement and some white tuna. For Breakfast, I had a sweet treat of some baklava which is filo dough with honey and some pistachio nuts!
CERN
This week at CERN, I kept on developing the algorithms to analyze data from the Cesium scans (Code here: ).https://github.com/anthonytec2/CERN-Tile-Cal-MAPMT. One of the most important parts of my project is developing a solid array processing algorithm for tiles to peaks. Therefore, I am currently working on a way to add the different pixels from the Multi Anode PMT(MA- PMT) to perform this operation.
Acropolis
I was able to visit the Acropolis during my trip to Greece. The Acropolis was a set of various ruins from ancient Greece. One of the most interesting part of the ruins is they were developed to be visually appealing in multiple ways. For example, rather than feel the building is going to fall onto you the building leans inwards. Additionally, the stairs along a same level are not at the same height, in the middle they are raised by a few centimeter. Lots of optical illusionary were performed on some of the ruins of the Acropolis! Take a look at some of the pictures to see more.
Temple of Poseidon
The Temple of Poseidon is right at the Southern Tip of mainland Greece near the Aegean sea. Perched right at the top of a hill, this temple has a beautiful view of the Athenian countryside and of the islands of Greece.
Food
Here is the Google Photos story for week 6: https://goo.gl/photos/VKH5i9ZnSJPz4D9U7
Here is the Google Photos story for week 7: https://goo.gl/photos/AN5eq6mLXFJZfRe17
Here is the Google Photos story for week 7: https://goo.gl/photos/AN5eq6mLXFJZfRe17
THIS POST WILL BE REVIEWED LATER, I honestly have like zero time for anything so I am just going to post this and review at another point.
CERN
This week at CERN, I began to participate in some of the radioactive tests for the tile calorimeter module. Just a quick recap of the Tile Calorimeter is that it is a bunch of subdetectors made of scintillator which fluoresce when an energetic particle strikes the material. This fluorescent signal is then transferred to a photomultiplier readout via fiber optic cables. Now back to the test, basically a radioactive source is passed through a network of tubes to each sub detector. Therefore, when the source hits one submodule a signal will produced at the photomultiplier readout. This test was originally designed for single anode PMT, hence it was not optimized for the readout process of 64 more anodes for the multianode PMT.
A setup was rigged using the old hardware in the case where 48 integrator boards were placed on a super drawer(sliding electronics unit in the whole detector module). 47 of these signals sampled the multi anode PMT and 1 sampled a single anode PMT for a control. Next week we will continue to test this hardware and then finally place it in the tile calorimeter module for use.
Aside from the radioactive test setup, I had given a talk this week about the progression of the 3D printing fiber light guide process. So far, I have developed 4 different versions of my fiber light guide. Finally in the 4th generation, I have placed fibers in the module and began the epoxy process to glue in the fibers. If you want to see more about this check out: https://indico.cern.ch/event/578750/contributions/2345411/attachments/1357769/2053193/3D_Printing_Fiber_Light_Guide.pdf
Rome
Once again, I have given a short description of my time in Rome at each place. Although, please do check out the photo album of these places.
Vatican City
I got to see the Pope!!!! I went to the Vatican museum on Saturday and viewed all the different art work. After that, I went to St Peter’s Square to find the whole area was filled. I discovered after seeing a large screen with the Pope’s image display he was in the square. Therefore, I sat listening to the Italian, when all of a sudden the Italian switched to English. I found out that people had come from around the world to do a journey from Italy to Spain visiting major cathedrals along the way and living as peasants would have for repentance. At the end of the event, the Pope blessed everyone in the square!
Castel Sant Angelo
The Castel Sant Angelo is a castle in Rome that had a great view of the whole city of Rome. The castle has about 5 different floors built for guards to keep watch over the city. Decorated all throughout the castle are cannons, murals and artifacts.
Roman Forum
The Roman Forum is the grounds of an old city center. One interesting comment about this Forum is there is artifacts from a mixture of centuries.
Coliseum
I took a tour inside the Coliseum. I was able to view the various seating platforms for citizens and some of the trip doors used to raise animals.
Food
Hands down Rome has had the best food of my trip! My first night in Rome, I had an amazing meal featuring, fresh mozzarella, pasta carbonara, pig and some really good mineral water. Molto Beni! Aside from that meal, the pizza in Rome was amazing! One unique meal I had in Rome was a place called the Prosciutteria. At the Prosciutteria, I got a meat and cheese board all from the local Italy region! Legit was the best! I had a great culinary experience here and definitely rank it above Paris.
Paris
Notre Dam
Notre Dam is one of the famous cathedrals in Paris. Going inside the cathedral was free and had tons of cool artworks to see. The cathedral had massive ceilings with awesome stained glass from all around.
Versaille
Versaille was an awesome city filled with really interesting castle rooms for the king. Additionally, I went outside to the gardens which were very well kept. Only note about the gardens is only one of the fountains(out of ~100) were running. Therefore, I would definitely recommend visiting versaille in the summer season.
Arc de Triomphe
Arc de Triomphe is centered at the meeting point of 12 streets. The arch was built as a victory arch for military parades after winning wars. One the top of the arch there is an awesome look out over the entire city. I went up there and got some night cityscapes with the Eiffel Tower in the foreground, take a look in the album.
Eiffel Tower
See post last time in Paris about cool things of the Eiffel Tower.
French Pantheon
The French Pantheon is home to many famous French people's bodies such as Marie Curie and Voltaire.
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.
Google Photos for this week: Link
https://goo.gl/photos/B59t2iYb6dpCKYhk7
https://goo.gl/photos/B59t2iYb6dpCKYhk7
CERN
This week at work, I spent most of my time learning new techniques in Solidworks. For example, I learned how to create multiple planes to develop sketches on and develop a feature between these two planes. This skill is important for my fiber coupling project, as I need to design a unique device the changes a polar array hole pattern into a linear array hole pattern. One of the interesting concepts of my design is that each of these holes will be isolated from each other reducing crosstalk amongst fibers. As for the coupling between the polar array of holes and the fiber bundle, I am performing an interesting DSP technique to perform this operation. First, I take a picture of a fiber bundle. After, I then take this image into MATLAB and perform a cropping and edge detection algorithm. The edge detection algorithm in this process reveals the fiber bundle’s pattern, hence allowing for the perfect development of a 1 to 1 fiber coupler. One thing that I still have not figured out is how to exactly map the hole pattern, although I think I can perform some sort of curved cut. I will continue working on trying to develop and implement this next week.
One other part of my week was attending a seminar for the book, “Only the Longest Threads,” by Tasneem Zehra Husain. One cool part of the book is that it is a fictional book about all of physics biggest discoveries. Each chapter of the book details a different discovery from the point of view of not the “Famous Discover” but, the graduate and PhD students performing the work leading up to the discovery. A little about the author, Husain is a Pakistani string theorist working in Cambridge, United States of America, on new theoretical physicists concepts. Husain highlighted that one of the most important parts about the book was developing the idea, science is a group effort! She highlights this by, giving the perspective of the people who developed and performed the experiments that lead to a discovery. After reading the first two chapters of the book, I find this concept artfully developed! Additionally, the book has a very nice introduction to physics concepts for that of any interested person in the field.
Berlin, Germany
This week, I went to Berlin, Germany! The city had tons to see. Additionally, while I was in Berlin there was a festival of lights, which I was able to see. The trip was awesome, I will list of few things I saw below, along with a short description.
German Buildings
During my time in Berlin, I had taken a 6 hour walking tour of Berlin. The tour visited various places such as museum island, Berlin church, Checkpoint Charlie, Ghost Stations, the Brandenburg Gate, the Silent Library, the Jewish memorial and the Reichstag. Throughout the tour, our guide from Pittsburgh described all the intricate details of German history for each these monuments. I will try to do a quick review for some of these buildings:
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing point between the Western sector of Berlin(American Side) to the Eastern sector of Berlin(Soviet Side). During my visit to the replica checkpoint in Berlin various signs were up all around describing what I just said above, in Russian/English. Additionally, “American Soldiers”(Dressed up Germans) were standing in front of the checkpoint for photos(4 euros each).
Ghost Station
A ghost station is a metro station in central Berlin that was shut down to disallow easy travel between Eastern and Western Berlin. At each ghost station, a wall was placed in front of all easily accessible entrances. The only people able to access these stations were members of the Ministry of State Security who would keep watch of the metro tunnels. The reason why people had to do this is the Soviet party had fears, that if enemies were to attack they would come from the underground system. One problem with this system was the tunnels were left open for border guards to travel. Hence, many guards would just cross the border to West Germany from East Germany to enjoy the freedoms of that side. After Soviets saw this happening, a wall was put up against all train station platforms with peep holes for officers to continue watch but not travel to get to the tunnels. As an additional layer, guards were watching each other for out of line behavior eliminating radical thoughts of escape.
Silent Library
The silent library is a memorial to the books that were burned by a group of students removing any freethought books from school libraries during the Soviet era. Just as no one can go back and turn back time of the removal of all these books, the silent library is an underground memorial unreachable to anyone. The memorial is viewed through a small glass window in the ground, which one can see 4 huge book shelves empty.
Jewish Memorial
The Jewish memorial is a memorial to the events of the Holocaust. The memorial is a huge sight which looks like a 2D histogram(bunch of piled up stone at different locations). One interesting idea about the whole memorial is there are no signs that indicate what is this place. Therefore, people can roam free about it without the knowledge of properly respecting the memorial. An idea as to why this is done is to signify the duty of bystanders to stop other people’s erroneous actions, which lacked during the rise of the Nazi party. Another interesting idea of the memorial is the different stacking heights of the blocks in the memorial. One interpretation of this is to signify the amount of bodies stacked into different graves. Lastly, the whole memorial has no described meaning, so any interpretations can be made(Take a look at picture to make your own).
Potsdam
Potsdam is a royal city built with many different palaces amongst the city for the Prussian Kings. Normally, people usually spend 8 hours here, since I had a tour, I only had about an hour. Hence, I had to rush through a lot of buildings in a small amount of time. First when I got into the town, I saw one of the magnificent little piazza with a bright pink color throughout the whole region(Interesting to see the color changes from Berlin to Potsdam, going from grays and black to pinks and light blues). As I walked from the piazza, I found a whole little town with restaurants, groceries and tons other things. After walking through the town, I reached the park where the one palace I saw was present. The palace was amazing, there was a beautiful fountain display in the middle, a small vineyard in front of the palace and an open air theater in the back of the palace. After seeing this palace, I had to sprint right back to the train station to make my illuminated tour!
Festival of Lights
The Berlin Festival of Lights was by far the coolest part of my trip. Two Berlin light groups started this festival, illuminating various monuments around Berlin. Every year the groups develop a theme for the festival, this year the themes were, Light Connects and Light Crosses Cultures. I am not going to describe all the various illuminated monuments, it is better to just take a look through all the cool pictures that I have taken! One that I am just going to point out is the green map on a wall, which is actually an illumination of the subway map of Berlin.
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (Stasi Political Prison)
The Hohenschönhausen Memorial is the political prison used by the Stasi to hold political prisoners. Some reasons for being thrown in this prison were any anti East Berlin action, such as plans to cross the border, protesting in East Berlin and not doing your fair share of work. The prison was setup for isolation of all prisoners, therefore no human connections can form and you start to break down. During prisoner's’ time in the prison, the only person you were allowed to talk to was your interrogator. These interrogators had one goal which was to flesh out an other East Berlin defectors. Since prisoners did not talk to anyone else many times connections would form between interrogators and prisoners, hence Stockholm Syndrome would take effect, resulting in giving up information.
Food
During my time in Berlin, I was able to have Berlin's classic currywurst two times during my trip. For those not familiar, currywurst is basically sausage steamed and fried, kind of like a hot dog. Aside from currywurst, I had a great dish of pork loin and vegetables for dinner with some special German sauce. As for breakfast, I had a Berliner, which is a jelly donut making fun of a speech given by John F. Kennedy(search up for more info). Finally for my last meal in the airport, I had a Salmon burger!
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!
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.
