This was originally posted in the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern). It’s reproduced here because I am the author!

On the night of my last ATLAS night shift, I recorded some of the more interesting parts of getting from my temporary home in Carouge (south of downtown Geneva) to CERN. The photos and movie below tell a story of how a physicist gets around so that they can get things done on shift.

Waiting at Place du Marche for one of either the No. 12, No. 13, or No. 14 trams to arrive. It’s about 9:30 p.m., and the sun’s last rays are visible in the sky. This far north, it gets dark late in the evening.

A No. 12 tram pulls up to the Marche stop. The 12 goes to the east side of Lake Geneva, and I need to be on the west side. This will only get me as far as Plainpalais before I’ll have to hop trams.

I hop off the 12 at Plainpalais. This is a nexus of different tram lines. This station is new, with statues, cast in metal, of people engaged in various commuter activities.

I cross the intersecting roads and tram lines to another stop, waiting for a No. 14 tram. It pulls up to the stop two minutes after I arrive. This one will get me as far as Meyrin, a community near CERN.

I arrive at Meyrin-Graviere, the end-of-the-line for trams in the Meyrin Community. Now I wait for the 56 bus, which terminates at CERN.

The 56 bus arrives a few minutes after I get to Meyrin. On my short ride from Meyrin to CERN, I have some company on the bus; people, just like me, trying to get to CERN to work.

Once the 56 arrives at CERN, it’s a short walk from the stop to the ATLAS Control Room. Join me on my walk. It’s about 10:40 p.m. now, just 20 minutes to the start of night shift and just 5 minutes from when I need to debrief the previous shifter.

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This was originally posted in the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern). It’s reproduced here because I am the author!

10:45 p.m., a cluster of massive buildings marking the location of the Point 1 Control Room for the ATLAS Experiment. ATLAS is itself 90 meters below the earth.

It’s 10:40 p.m. when I leave building 1, cut through a parking lot, and head for CERN Entrance B. It’s only been 6 hours since I woke up; I’ve rotated my schedule to put myself on a night-cycle. This is not easy for a human being. We’re adapted to the sun, and we run our lives by it. The gentle rhythms of our biological clocks crave the day-night cycle. But here I am, a physicist in Switzerland standing at a crosswalk, waiting to step into the distant dark and down to the Point 1 Control Room.

The ATLAS Control Room, or ACR, is located in the back of a cluster of large surface buildings. I say “surface buildings” because these structures mark the top hat of ATLAS, covering the large shaft that descends down to the ATLAS cavern, 90 meters (295 feet) below the earth. Approaching the buildings in the dark is an eerie experience. You walk from the intersection of Route de Meyrin and CERN Entrance B, up a tree-shaded, unlit driveway to a long security gate. A wave of your CERN ID in front of the gate sensor starts the gate on a slow slide to the left, allowing you to squeeze through. The cluster of lighted buildings then sits in the distance, perhaps another 100 feet away.

We gather at the Run Control desk to discuss committing some configuration changes to a database. The LHC is currently down, addressing some issues with the CMS experiment.

The ACR itself is abuzz with activity, even at 11pm. I relieve the previous shifter at the Trigger Desk. We exchange information about the day’s activities. The Run Control shifter, an old colleague of mine from Scotland, comes over and asks for my approval of the current set of trigger configurations and then about committing some changes to a database. Despite the fact that there are no beams in the LHC, it’s a busy night. I had been told by the previous trigger shifter not to expect colliding beams until at least 5 am.

There is a routine to a shift that I like very much. Most of it involves checking dozens of windows, each which displays some nuanced aspect of the ATLAS trigger system. The “trigger” is a computer hardware and software system whose sole job is to decide if a particular proton-proton collision is interesting enough to write to disk for further investigation. If the trigger isn’t running correctly, physics can be tossed aside and wasted. In addition to the technical routine, there is the job of interacting with colleagues in related systems, like the Data Acquisition Shifter who sits next to me, or the Shift Leader. It’s important to keep exchanging information while on shift, and work together to solve problems. There are always problems, and that’s the real fun of taking shifts.

The two coffee machines that serve the ACR. The Nespresso machine on the right is my favorite.

To survive a night shift, even after rotating your schedule, you need coffee. Or, at least, I need coffee. Two floors up from the ACR is a pair of coffee machines that make decent espresso. I’m a big fan of these two machines; they’re really the unsung heroes of the ATLAS experiment. On the floor between the ACR and the coffee, painted on the wall along the staircase, is a mural of the ATLAS detector depicting different particles interacting in the equipment. The painting is 1:1 scale, meaning that as you walk up the stairs and follow an electron back along its illustrated path, you are getting a sense of the immense journey that this high-energy subatomic particle is making from the proton-proton collision that birthed it.

Whenever I am on night shift, I think about my mother-in-law. She’s been working in a bakery for decades, and that means she’s up between midnight and 3 am, in time to go in and do all the prep work and baking for the day. It’s a hard life, and she’s been doing it a long time. She does it because the job demands it – people want their baked goods first thing in the morning, when they get up to do their “normal” jobs at “normal” hours. For physicists on a major experiment like ATLAS, the data demands to be taken at all hours of the day. In fact, night is the most stable time to take data – the people that like to tweak the collider are home for the day, leaving a shift crew behind who are ready and eager to have stable operating conditions through the late hours of the night. On the experimental side, we welcome such conditions – stable beams mean steady data. ATLAS, and the other LHC experiments, will run 24 hours a day for most months of the year. a crew of hundreds of people per experiment is needed to maintain the detector. It’s not just the people in the ACR – the “seen” – it’s those who work in the satellite control room, in distant homes and offices doing remote shifts, and on-call experts who commit themselves to this task 24-hours a day for months at a time. Those are the “unseen”, the people without whom the experiment fails but who don’t get to be on the ACR webcam.

A 1:1 scale mural of a segment of the ATLAS detector, depicting in life-size the journey of different subatomic particles.

It’s 12:30 am. My shift is just beginning, and it’s starting to quiet in the ACR. The LHC is promising beams in the machine in 30 minutes or so. They aren’t messing with the collider settings too much, which means we may get steady data tonight. It occurs to me that I am almost on Dallas time, here in this distant control room for a global experiment. It’s dark outside, but I feel alive. There is a deep and substantial pleasure in committing yourself to an experiment like this, one which cannot be explained but through weak analogy to pride of place and service. We are subatomic shepherds, here in the ACR, looking to bring the data home.

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This was originally posted in the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern). It’s reproduced here because I am the author!

What DOES a professor do during the summer months? I found it amusing – and, to be fair, a bit reminiscent of my own beliefs when I was a student – that several undergraduates at SMU thought I took the summer off. So, just what DOES a professor do during the summer?

It depends on the professor, but many of us devote ourselves to teaching classes and many devote ourselves to research. Of course, we mingle the disciplines a lot – just because you’re teaching doesn’t mean you aren’t thinking deep thoughts about physics, and just because you’re doing research doesn’t mean you aren’t ready to teach at a moment’s notice.

Tingting (left) and Aidan (right) discuss particle accelerator beam structure next to a full-scale model of the Large Hadron Collider.

For my own case, it’s been a lot of both. I am joined this summer by an SMU graduate student, Tingting Cao (featured recently in [1]). She has never worked on an experiment like ATLAS before. The sheer magnitude of things you need to learn to make sense of day-to-day ATLAS physics and activities is immense. Tingting’s devotion and enthusiasm have so far carried her a long way in this regard. However, as a professor it is incumbent upon me to insure that TIngting has all the tools she needs not only to answer questions, but to know how to ask lots of questions.

My post-doc, Aidan, has been instrumental in working with Tingting to discuss physics and to teach her how to write analysis software (using C++, the language du jour of big collider physics). One of the great traps of software is that you can spend so much time learning just how to do it, you forget why you’re doing it. In collider physics, there is an ever-present tension between making progress (by writing analysis code) and seeing “the big picture” (why you are writing code in the first place). Aidan and I have been working hard, with a lot of help from Tingting’s curiosity, to keep that tension at bay.

In the foreground, a “warm” quadrupole magnet (meaning it operates at room temperature, rather than the superconducting temperatures needed by the Large Hadron Collider). In the background, Tingting and I discuss how such magnets act to focus charged particles.

We recently used the Microcosm, a teaching and learning center at CERN (which Aidan will discuss in a separate post) to learn about particle physics hardware. For instance, we discussed how magnets are to electrically charged particles as lenses are to light: they steer and focus the beams so that they are right where you want them. Shown below is a quadrupole magnet – a magnet with two pairs of North and South Poles – which act to focus charged particles. You need a long sequence of these to control the size of the beam, and the care and skill that goes into building and coordinating such magnets is incredible.

It’s not always about the hardware. Sometimes, you just want to understand why subatomic particles like quarks lead not to single particles in your detector, but “jets” – cone-like sprays containing dozens of particles smashing into your tracking system, your energy readout system (“calorimeters”), and your muon system (needed to detect the less-interacting, heavy cousin of the electron – the muon). Tingting asked for a lecture about how you go from simple diagrams of quarks and leptons – “Feynman Diagrams” – to the complex signatures of particles in the ATLAS detector. Aidan and I spent over an hour going step-by-step through an example diagram, discussing all the physics we could. In fact, veterans of my “Modern Physics” class from last semester may recall a problem involving whether or not top quarks can bind together via the strong force [2]. Tingting asked about just that process, in the context of other kinds of quarks, and we discussed that very problem as part of the lecture.

Tingting and I discuss what different kinds of particles will look like in an ATLAS-like detector (photo by Aidan Randle-Conde).

Teaching doesn’t stop when the summer starts for those of us who do research in the summer, just as new ideas for physics papers and projects don’t stop when the teaching starts. Being a physicist sometimes demands both, and it makes the enterprise all the sweeter to know that it’s impossible to separate the doing from the learning.

[1] “Knowing the Hardware”, by Aidan Randle-Conde, SMU CERN Blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/2010/07/knowing_the_hardware_1.html)

[2] Problem SS-13: “Top Mesons” (PHY 3305, Spring 2010) http://www.physics.smu.edu/sekula/phy3305/homeworksolutions010.pdf

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This was originally posted in the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern). It’s reproduced here because I am the author!

I made some promises to myself for the summer: not too much eating out, regular food shopping, and home-cooked meals. Switzerland and France are expensive places; for instance, a shopping bag containing some vegetables (a few peppers and tomatoes), fruit (apples and bananas), some cheese, milk, yogurt, baguette, and pasta runs close to 30-40 Swiss Franc (about $25-$35 U.S.). However, a single meal at a restaurant often runs AT LEAST this much.

Whipping this into something resembling a tasty meal takes some extra effort. Air conditioning is not common in Switzerland, unless the building is for business; running the stove for 30 minutes to make dinner means sweating through your clothes, with temperatures in the 80s and humidity at uncomfortable levels.

I’ve managed to stick close to my promise. My host and I have shared cooking duties over the past two weeks, including the meal shown below:

From top to bottom: artichokes (cooked in some oil and tomato); beans cooked with peppers, onions, garlic, and cream; and chicken paprikash (chicken sauteed in cream, onion, pepper, paprika, and garlic).

Of course, food means gathering – not just eating alone. A few of the SMU graduate students organized a Fourth of July cookout at a park near CERN and Meyrin, a residential community by the laboratory. There were burgers and sausages, pickles and condiments and even American chips (Doritos!). We were joined not only by SMU folk, but by friends and colleagues from other Universities, including nearby UT Arlington and far-flung New York University (NYU). Kids were present, too, which made the whole thing feel a lot more like a family gathering on the 4th and less like a bunch of work colleagues hanging out and tossing a frisbee.

(From left to right: Ryan (SMU grad. student), Tingting (SMU grad student), Rozmin (SMU grad student), Kyle (NYU Professor, standing behind Rozmin), Renat (SMU grad student), AIdan (SMU post-doc), Sami (SMU engineer), Amir (UTA Professor), Haleh (SMU post-doc, behind Amir), and Ryszard (SMU Professor). For more about people in our department, see http://www.physics.smu.edu/web/people/index.html.

Of course, sometimes you do eat out. It’s unavoidable. There is a budding tradition in the SMU CERN group of picking a new place on Friday night, someplace preferably where you can dine for less than 20-30 CHF and which can be added to the list of affordable but tasty restaurants in Geneva. This past Friday evening, we found ourselves at a small local chain of chicken restaurants with a limited but delicious menu. The most popular item at our table? The half-chicken, roasted, with fries and salade (demi-poulet avec pommes frites et salade).

(from left to right: Rozmin, Renat, Aidan, and Ryan

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This was originally posted in the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern). It’s reproduced here because I am the author!

Physicists seem to have a reputation, self-made or otherwise, for discussing physics on writing surfaces that are . . . less than typical. The most common phrase for a quick, short, but somewhat accurate calculation is a “back-of-the-envelope calculation,” implying the nature of the writing surface: whatever is at hand.

In the CERN cafeteria, over mouthfuls of paella and sips of water, sometimes your discussion about contributions to electrically charged particle radiation demands a writing surface. The napkins were all used, no envelopes in sight, and suddenly my colleague (an SMU post-doctoral researcher named Aidan) said, “We can use this banana peel – it works quite well!” He began scribbling a diagram of radiation loss versus energy for a few processes, writing in swift, smooth strokes on the waxy but rough surface of the banana peel. Believe it or not, it does make a FABULOUS writing surface!

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The following were originally published on the SMU CERN blog (http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/) [1] [2] and are re-printed here because I am the author.

Stumbling upon CERN

Particle physics is not about traveling, although you tend to travel a lot in this business. It is not about speaking foreign languages or learning foreign customs, although collaboration with colleagues across the globe necessitates both. It is not about playing with technology and developing software, although the field would make no progress without both. At its heart, particle physics is simply about uncovering fundamental knowledge about the composition and behavior of the cosmos. Pursuit of this goal, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, demands travel and French and hadron colliders; it also demands excitement, commitment, and sometimes its own brand of suffering.

I write this as I am sitting on a United flight from Dallas to Washington D.C., in preparation for the second leg of my journey from Washington to Geneva, Switzerland [*]. It is summer, perhaps the most active time for physicists on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory. The LHC is, at its heart, something like a time machine and microscope all rolled into a single, 17-mile underground tunnel. It is a time machine in the sense that it recreates an energy that we believe has not been common in the universe since a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the mysterious event that initiated our universe. It is a microscope in the sense that protons are really, quite fundamentally, waves and not particles. As such, when accelerated around the 17-mile tunnel at a speed tantalizingly close to that of light they achieve incredibly small wavelengths. Just like the hundred-nanometer wavelengths of visible light allow us to perceive very tiny structures, the even smaller wavelengths of high-energy protons give us the ability to discern the kinds of incredibly subatomic phenomena that were present just after the Big Bang.

Summer (circa July) is one of the two busiest times of the year for particle physics, the other being winter (circa March). The reason these are so busy is that they are punctuated by major conferences, the showcase for new results. Particle physicists of every breeding – experimental, phenomenological, and theoretical alike – brace for the impact of new results, or prime their own work for unveiling. Science is a discipline, but one which works atop a kind of unpredictable liberty of exploration and discovery; one never knows what news will come from a conference, but all are prepared to both receive and criticize it.

This summer is my own brand of busy, both because of what I said above – it’s time to buckle down and get super-serious in time for conferences – but also because my teaching responsibilities are on pause until the fall semester and I have a research group to build. A faculty member pursuing research as well as teaching often, when possible, takes on both students and post-doctoral researchers. This summer, I am graced by one of each: a new post-doctoral researcher who, like me, is just beginning their life on the LHC; and a graduate student who just finished her first year and is eager for a summer of research on the LHC. Building and running a research group, even within our larger SMU LHC effort, means not only being deeply invested in the research itself, but also being invested in supporting the research environment. A professor’s job is to cultivate talent, encourage the pursuit of ideas, and focus multiple lines of effort. A professor’s job is also to rattle the cage every now and then, to stir the mind to tangential thoughts, and to make sure that each member of the research team is content in the enterprise (especially when the research gets tough).

France and Switzerland, which the CERN laboratory straddles, present their own unique challenges to the research environment. While CERN itself is a vibrant and healthy academic and research environment, there are a thousand little things that a non-European has to know when pursuing a summer of work at CERN. First and foremost, a little French can get you a long way, even if only as a polite means to try to instigate a conversation in English. Second, don’t expect a 24-hour culture like in the U.S. Stores tend to close every day by 6:30 p.m. (except for “extended” shopping hours on Thursday, which run to 7:30 p.m.) and are typically closed on Sunday. Public transportation is great on the Swiss side, but not so great on the French side; however, the quality of life and ease of finding an apartment is generally better on the French than the Swiss side (the bureaucracies are also strikingly different, and far more strict on the Swiss side). If you’re on shift on an experiment, and your shifts begin at 7am (like on my experiment, ATLAS), be forewarned that the CERN cafeteria doesn’t open until 7 a.m. so you’ll need alternative breakfast plans. Office space is at a premium at CERN; if you don’t know somebody who can help out, you need to appeal to experimental support organizations who can get you a temporary desk (for a couple of weeks).

On the other hand, the relaxed food culture is great when you just want a low-pressure night out enjoying some delicious European fare with colleagues. Most work gets done over coffee (espresso, really, but they call it “coffee”) in the CERN cafeteria, or in any of the dozens of smaller cafes sprinkled across the site (there is a particularly nice one in the CMS office buildings).  Blowing 15 or 30 minutes shooting the breeze with a colleague over a hot cup of <em>cafe au lait</em> will often solve more problems than hours of keyboard banging and cursing. Be prepared to relax, but punctuate that with periods of intense devotion to a problem (or problems). Above all, be ready to collaborate. In experiments the size of ATLAS and CMS (3000 people each), you can hang together or hang separately (to paraphrase Ben Franklin).

I was once a summer student at CERN. It was my first experience outside of the United States. It was overwhelming and exhilarating. I have never forgotten the sweet, flowery aroma of the Geneva countryside in summer, nor the intense intellectual struggle at CERN, nor the equally intense struggle of ordering food without knowing a lot of French. Now I am a professor at CERN, trying to remember and pass on everything I learned that first summer in Geneva so that the members of our research group can, instead, make new mistakes. After all, how are we going to create new knowledge if we don’t learn to stumble in new ways?

[*]  Author’s note: the connecting flight to Geneva was delayed 3 hours due to technical problems. We sat on the tarmac for over an hour before they unloaded the passengers and luggage and placed us on a second plane. This falls under “own brand of suffering”!

On the theory of e-mail contraction as distance approaches CERN

Normally, when I wake up in Dallas and get to the point of processing my e-mail, I have 70-100 messages to deal with. That’s because CERN is 7 hours ahead of Dallas, so by the time I wake up half of their work day is done.

Now that I have traveled 7 hours “into the future” by coming to CERN, it is a pleasing side-effect that as I go to process my e-mail, I have only 22 messages. Most of these are automated, from electronic logbook posts (for instance), and so we have the first benefit of coming to CERN: forward time travel has made my inbox smaller.

Hmm. I wonder if e-mail contracts as you travel east on a plane, just as space contracts as you approach the speed of light? Or maybe it’s just that distance from CERN increasingly warps the size of your inbox . . .

[1] http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/2010/06/stumbling_upon_cern.html

[2] http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/2010/06/on_the_theory_of_email_contrac.html

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The first big event in the past few weeks is the appearance of my post-doctoral researcher at SMU. He’s still in the throes of wrapping up his thesis, but that will all be settled in the next two weeks. Despite that, we’ve hit the ground running, including beginning to make some in-roads to ATLAS physics and all-important detector operations and development work. In fact, I would say that the determination and enthusiasm level on the ATLAS side of my life has increased by a factor of 10 since his arrival. Having a post-doctoral researcher who serves as the research nexus of the group is critical to any faculty physics program.

The arrival of this researcher also helps to glue together my work with a graduate student who is joining me for the summer. We now have all levels of the research enterprise in physics represented, sans an undergraduate researcher. We’ve begun weekly progress meetings (no more than an hour, to keep in line with my philosophy that time and attention are finite and precious resources in physics), and we’re starting to think deeply about physics at a hadron collider. The past week has been filled with discussions about single-diffraction, double-diffraction, minimum bias, decays of heavy bosons, simulations of fundamental physics, and triggering.

CERN will be our Mecca this summer, our Hajj on the wings of a great jet airplane and on the backs of Geneva public transportation. This trip would be impossible without the support of my friends and colleagues, who have generously offered to host my student, post-doc, and me until we get setup. A roof over ones head, and money to buy food, are two of the most critical things to building happiness in research. Freed from the fears of finding housing and food, we will be liberated to put all our efforts into thinking about the universe, and how to unlock its mysteries.

I’ll try to be vigilant about reporting some stories of the summer here. In addition, I’ll be collecting audio this summer in preparation for a series of podcasts in the fall. If your interested in talking about your passion for physics, about how you got into this field and what keeps you going every day, I’d love to talk to you this summer!

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Our last full day of the trip began with a drive up the peninsula’s scenic highway, 280, to highway 1, and then just shy of the Golden Gate Bridge. Construction routed us away from the usual exit and instead up a scenic road overlooking the Pacific and the mouth of the Golden Gate. Eventually, we wound our way through SF city streets to the Exploratorium, a massive building next to the Palace of Fine Arts.

Unknown to us before we arrived, an awards dinner was being hosted there that night. About half the exhibits were closed off, along with the cafe. We got half-price admission as a result, and spent the next 1.5 hours playing with infrared cameras, soap bubbles, ore-rich sand and magnets, vortices, optical tricks, sound demonstrations, and my favorite: the cloud chamber.

We left as the Exploratorium was closing and headed over to Fisherman’s Wharf. After some initial exploring as a group, we broke into two smaller groups: one for Ghiradelli Square and the other for a walk out to a pier for photos of the city. When we regrouped at 5, we headed into one of the wharf’s many seafood restaurants for the final dinner of the trip. Over crab and shrimp and scallops, we traded stories and talked about all the things to come this summer.

We closed the day just an hour before sunset by parking at the Golden Gate Bridge and walking the whole 1.7 miles across, then the same back. The air was cool and windy, the traffic heavy over the bridge, and the city glowing like embers in the last rays of the setting sun. Building windows across the bay, in the Oakland hills, blazed like beacons in the sunset. We finally all arrived back at our van and headed back to the hotel.

We are all extremely grateful for Mr. Lightner’s support for this unique trip: a chance for the SPS students to experience a unique cradle of science and technology and all the environs that make people want to live here. Today, we concentrate on getting home.

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The last two days were extremely busy. Tuesday began with breakfast at Izzy’s Bagels again (by popular demand), and then we took some rest before piling into the van and heading to a few stops. The first was Eric’s Gourmet, a great little sandwich shop right near SLAC and a SLAC staple for many years. We then fueled up at the SLAC gift shop on tee shirts, mugs, and umbrellas – something we had forgotten to do on Monday while we were at SLAC. SLAC is conveniently located by the highway that takes us due south, then east, to Mt. Hamilton.

The road up to the top of Mt. Hamilton was long and winding. Twenty miles of nauseating twists and turns, with sheer drops and no guard rails, awaited us. We chugged slowly up the mountain, finally arriving at the observatory. After a subdued lunch in the cool, foggy air, we headed into the main building for a short tour. The tour treated us to a view of the large reflecting telescope in the main observatory building. While old, the telescope is still used about twice a week, depending on atmospheric conditions. The entire floor surrounding the telescope tower can raise and lower to allow for optimal viewing, the massive telescope is so well-balanced that a single observer can move it by hand using a large handle near the eyepiece.

Following that, we walked the half-mile to the 120-inch reflecting telescope, up a winding mountain road. By then, we were pretty tired, and sat in the dark outside the telescope half-napping to informational videos about the telescope. We concluded our visit to Lick with a walk past a few of the other 10 telescopes on the mountain, heading back to the van and our decent down the mountain. We closed that day with dinner at a noodle house in San Jose.

(Photos from day three)

The third day began with breakfast at one of my own favorite eateries – Stacks, a pancake house in Menlo Park. We were joined by a few colleagues, including our SLAC tour guide.

After breakfast, we headed over to the Bay trails near NASA Ames, to get in a walk and take in the site of the NASA Ames Research Center in the distance. We walked through salt marshland, the Bay to our northeast and the sprawling hangars and wind tunnels of NASA Ames to our southwest. Tired, hungry, and (for some) suffering allergies from all the plants near the trail, we headed into downtown Mountain View for lunch at Sono Sushi. We broke into small groups after that and browsed the small shops along Castro St. in Mt. View, including a vast used book store and a coffee shop.

This killed enough time that we were ready to head to Google for a private tour by a physics colleague of mine who now works at Google. He not only took us around the campus, he arranged a small forum with himself and another trained physicist who also works at Google. They fielded questions, asked about the students’ interests and experience, and gave us some amazing insight into the research philosophy of this important information company. We learned about 20% projects, which employees are encouraged to pursue out of interest in addition to their main projects. We learned about TGIF, a weekly Friday briefing on that week’s accomplishments in the company held in the main cafeteria. We saw the flexible cubicle spaces, the tent-like meeting rooms that look temporary but which are actually fixed parts of the work landscape. We learned about distraction, how to achieve it, and how not to fall prey to it. My own view of what Google is, and how it functions, was radically changed by this experience.

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Our tour began at 1pm with a short overview of the laboratory. Nicole delivered this  presentation from the SLAC Director’s  conference room. We then piled into the van again and headed into the accelerator area. Our tour started at the Klystron Gallery, one-quarter of the way along the two-mile linear accelerator that is the heart of SLAC science. The buzzing microwave generators, the klystrons, were busy feeding energy into the accelerator (25 feet below us) for use in the Linac Coherent Light Source. We stood in the gallery hallway, stared off into infinity (OK, well, to the vanishing point of the human eye), and then piled back in the van.

(for more photos, visit http://snappy.cooleysekula.net/thumbnails.php?album=10)

We saw the Main Control Center, the heart of accelerator operations at SLAC, and then took a short walk down a dark, cramped tunnel to the Research Yard. It was here that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the experiments were done that demonstrated that protons have substructure. This substructure came to be interpreted using the “quark hypothesis,” long unfavored as an explanation of proton and hadron structure until mountains of evidence appeared in support of it. We paused on the steel walkway, two stories above the ground, and looked out over the yard at the massive concrete end stations A and B, as well as the new extension of the linear accelerator that serves the light-source community at the laboratory.

We next stopped at the Stanford Large Detector (SLD), which ceased operations in the late 1990s around the time BaBar was completed and began operations. Donning hardhats, we were shown parts of the detector before descending into the detector pit for a quick photograph. We wrapped up the tour in the BaBar detector hall, where the experiment stood largely disassembled; only 2/3 of the barrel and back endcap remain, and the tracking system has been gutted from the detector. It’s the first time I’ve watched an experiment important in my own career be taken apart and shipped away. It was a deeply meaningful, and slightly painful, moment. I was happy, however, to pose in front of BaBar with my two undergraduate researchers, Landon and Matthew, who have done their projects on data from the BaBar Experiment.

We wrapped the day with coffee and rest in the Kavli Astroparticle Institute, before heading off for a nice casual dinner at In & Out Burger, a staple of California fast food. It was a nice counterpoint to the spicy and exotic Thai food we feasted on last night.

Tomorrow, we head to the top of Mount Hamilton to see the Lick Observatory. Among its many studies, it was the site of the first U.S. test of General Relativity, and should afford spectacular views of the entire Bay Area.

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