In an effort to stay awake on the first day of jet lag (my first day at CERN), I spent time thinking about how to adapt our existing electrically charged Higgs boson search – geared toward the decay of top quarks – to a new, heavy Higgs search where the Higgs is produced alongside a top quark.

After dinner on the first night, we go to the top of the building that houses the CERN Main Auditorium and take photos of CERN at dusk.

CERN at night, as photographed from my CERN Hostel Room. I will never forget what my father said to me once when he took me to Boston College, his graduate alma mater. He told me that when the lights were on in the lab at night, you knew there were people in there staying up later than you, working on harder problems than you.

The new courtyard outside the CERN Restaurant No. 1 looks like some alien sawblade.

Mont Blanc stands huge and gorgeous on a particularly clear day.

The Jura are the mountains to the west of CERN (Mt. Blanc and the Alps are far to the east). The strange tower in the foreground is a water tower. It was also my signature goal during my runs at CERN, each of which was about 2.5 miles and involved running a few laps around a ring-road (part of an accelerator complex at CERN) just below the water tower.

A beautiful tree is blossoming. On this day, the blossoms were beginning to blow off in the wind, leaving behind the buds of leaves.

Sharing the same courtyard as the tree above was a fenced off area. Danger! Radiation!

A tour visitor center housed in the same space as the LHC magnet testing facility. This is a display part of an LHC superconducting dipole magnet.

The superconducting magnet test facility. It looks like a busy train station, complete with information signs on the platforms. One of these magnets is currently operating at 26 Kelvin. The magnets can be slid into place and hooked up to services, mimicking the conditions they experience 150m below us in the LHC tunnel.

The cryogens cooling the magnet superconductors to 26 Kelvin, if released into the air, are capable of liquifying the nitrogen in the air. Even if they warm up enough to avoid the liquid nitrogen state, they are still capable of causing the water in the air to rapidly precipitate out. Safety videos of this process shown during CERN training show a cryogen release, followed by cloud formation and precipitation.

A cutaway section of a superconducting dipole magnet shows the complex multi-layered inner workings.

Spare LHC magnets are housed here, in case they are needed.

A panoramic shot of the LHC control room. Just about a day later, LHC delivered the first 8 TeV proton-proton collisions.

Yes, please, continue to speak loudly outside my office. PLEASE.

http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/2012/03/31/it-goes-up-to-8/

Our SMU ATLAS group has been exploring some new directions in the search for and measurement of the Standard Model Higgs Boson. Our students and post-docs have been leading this effort so far, and my hope is to leap into the fray for a week and get my feet wet on the analysis. We’ve been partnering with physicists from outside of SMU, so this has been a very rewarding study for a new direction. I am also hoping to catch up on my own interests in the electrically charged Higgs Boson; our publication on last year’s data is imminent, and it’s time to think about new directions in that search as well. This week is an opportunity to step away from teaching and research – thanks to my co-professor in my course – and focus on research.

For now, though, this trip is just a lot of sitting in airports and waiting to get to CERN. This is the part I hate; the flights are just long enough to make me impatient and just short enough to prevent me from getting a really good night’s sleep on the plane. When I wake up tomorrow, I’ll be in Switzerland, ready to clear passport control and get my rental car. I don’t mind so much the arriving . . . but the waiting to arrive gets on my nerves.

Well, I guess I cannot complain too much. I have a Ph.D. thesis draft to read and markup in preparation for the thesis defense of one of our SMU graduate students. I also have at least two paper drafts to read and edit. It’s nice to be focused on physics papers for a change. Besides, if they are detailed enough and I am tired enough, I might just get more sleep than I originally planned for.

Listen to Episode 2: Composer Decomposer

The “Going Up Alleys” podcast is an ongoing conversation about curious avenuues of investigation. The world is a strange and complicated place. In this irregular podcast, we’ll see how different people strive to make sense of it through creative and critical thinking.

Show Notes

• Host: Kate Sekula is a graduate student in the University of Connecticut Music Department, working toward her Ph.D. in Music.
• Host: Steve Sekula is an assistant professor of physics at Southern Methodist University.
• Buy music from the composers discussed in this podcast: Michael Tippett’s “The Vision of St. Augustine” and “A Child of Our Time“;
• Michael Klein, Professor of Music at Temple University
• David Easley’s abstract about chord repetition in punk rock (presented at the Texas Society for Music Theory 34th annual meeting)
• The podcast theme music is entitled “Occipital,” from the album “Classicoco” by the artist Nicoco. The album is available from Jamendo and is freely downloadable under a Creative Commons “share and share-alike” license.
• This podcast was produced at Hampton House. Linux, Ubuntu, Audacity, a Shure SM-58 microphone,  and a little bit of “too much free time” were used in the making of this podcast.

Listen to Episode 1: The Cosmos and the Collider

In this inaugural episode, I shamelessly present my recent Godbey Lecture entitled “The Cosmos and the Collider: Our Quest to Understand the Universe.” I spoke to a room full of inquisitive Godbey Lecture Series members from a wide set of backgrounds and discussed the connection between collider physics and cosmic questions. I also attempted to communicate what it means to study physics at the LHC, and how recent hints of the Higgs particle may signal a new era of exploration in physics. What lies on the continent whose shores are marked by Mount Higgs?

Show Notes

• The SMU Godbey Lecture Series
• The SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College
• Writer Timothy Ferris, a science communicator who stirred my interest in physics
• ATLAS media links
• Music for the podcast is licensed under Creative Commons and is by the artist, Nicoco. The song used in the podcast is “Occipital,” from the album “Classicoco,” and is available from Jamendo.
• This podcast was produced at Hampton House, my little slice of Heaven. Linux and Ubuntu were used in the making of this podcast, as was Audacity, a Shure SM-58 microphone, a Macbook, a BLUE microphone, and a little bit of “too much free time.”