My CERN Experience

I Really Need to Write More Regularly

Sunday 24/06/18, 22:00

Once again I find myself having to catch you all up on several days at a time, I'm sorry that you have all been waiting so eagerly for so long dear readers. I have today been working on a system to automate the upload process for my blog entries, since I am not using any standard blogging platform, so hopefully I will be able to write more in future.

Thursday brought with it a visit to the main Data Centre and the 'Antimatter Factory'. Both are incredibly impressive feats of technology. The Data Centre is the primary computing facility at CERN, responsible for handling and storing the data generated by the detectors on the LHC. The purpose of the Antimatter Factory is to produce and study antimatter, looking to try and find any differences with matter, to explain the apparent matter-antimatter asymmetry. One of the key challenges is producing antiprotons and then decelerating them to energies where they might be contained and studied. Once the antiprotons are produced, they're then sent to a variety of experiments, each looking to examine different properties of antimatter.

Work for the latter part of the week has been focused on trying to get one program to run. We did finally manage that on Friday morning, which was useful as my supervisor left friday afternoon and will be away for the next week. I have been left to try and muddle through on my own; well not quite on my own, I can message my supervisor any time or get help from other people in the department, but it certainly feels more daunting. I appreciate the challenge though.

On friday evening I went into town with some of the other summer students to watch the football match: Switzerland vs Serbia. There's a place in the centre of Geneva, Plainpalais, where they set up some massive screens and streamed the match. The atmosphere was phenomenal among all the Swiss fans, especially with the tense end to the game. 1-1 since the 52nd minute, with Switzerland scoring a winner in the 90th minute. Of course we had to go for a few beers afterwards to celebrate. This culminated in 'missing' the last tram back to CERN at 12:30am, meaning it was either a two hour walk or waiting till the first tram at five in the morning. We didn't end up getting a tram until 6am in the end, going via a bar, an irish pub, a very odd club (you had to ring a doorbell to get in), and a rather pricey sandwich truck. It certainly made for an interesting night.

Since then, I've mostly been recovering, but I took the opportunity to do a bit of work on upgrading my blogging mechanics, as mentioned. Back to work tomorrow, hopefully I'll survive the week by myself.

Busy Start

Wednesday 20/06/18, 23:00

So I said I would probably be writing another blog post on Monday evening or Tuesday morning, but somehow it's reached Wednesday night and yet I still haven't written one; so here we go. It's been a very busy first few days, arriving at CERN, starting work, and socialising with some of the other summer students. I'll do my best, dear readers, to take you through the events of the past 60 hours...

So I landed in Geneva Monday morning, picked up my bag and a free transport ticket at the airport, and got the bus to the CERN site. I arrived just after 11am, and checked into my room at the hostel. A quick change of clothes, then I was off to the summer student team office to let them know I'd finally arrived. They were very understanding, and planned to set up a meeting for me that afternoon to catch me up on all the information given in the welcome meeting; in the mean time they told me where to find my supervisor so I could find out more about my project for the summer.

When I managed to find my supervisor, after 20 minutes of awkwardly sitting around outside his empty office, we went to get lunch at Restaurant 1 on site. We talked about what I'd be working on for the next 11 weeks; there were a lot of acronyms involved, none of which I was familiar with (some of which I still am not). The gist of it is that I'll be working with some of the electronics involved in data acquisition (DAQ) systems at CMS. The DAQ forms part of the trigger systems, which decide what collisions have created interesting phenomena and deserve to be kept for analysis. More specifically, I'll be programming these electronics to create testing interfaces, which will display their current state and what data they are receiving and transmitting. At least that's how I understand it currently, very much subject to change.

I spent most of the afternoon reading up on everything I'd just been told about, in the most part deciphering acronyms. In the remainder of the afternoon I went back to the summer student team office, they gave me a special presentation along with one other student who arrived late. They even set out juice and snacks for us to make up for missing the free breakfast they put on that morning. Possibly the most exciting part of the day, however, was when I got to pick up my CERN ID, which I have not been able to take off (I'm not going to pretend I don't sleep in it).

Monday evening I met up with some of the other summer students in Restaurant 1 for some food and beer. There are such a diverse range of people here, we spent a couple of hours chatting about ourselves, what we're working on at CERN, etc. Then we went to nearby watering hole in Saint-Genis, had a few beers, and watched the England match.

Tuesday and Wednesday I spent most of the day working; my first task was to update a piece of software, similar to the main one I'll be working on, fromm C++03 to C++11. Essentially, I spent a very long time fixing a very large number of errors, across thousands of lines of code designed for a different compiler. So, great fun. Tuesday afternoon I got to take a break to go on a visit to the first ever accelerator at CERN - the Synchrocyclotron. It was very interesting to find out about, I actually had no idea that it had ever existed. Apparently they wanted to get rid of it to make room for office space, but it was too expensive so they ended up keeping it. There was a video that went through some of the history of CERN as well, with some very impressive projections. We also had a visit to the ATLAS visitor centre, we couldn't visit the detector itself seeing as the machine is running, so we got a 3D film instead.

My Morning Commute

Monday 18/06/18, 09:15

I started trying to write my first blog entry yesterday, while flying from Birmingham to Paris en route to Geneva. I wrote around three sentences before I ran out of things to say. If the day had gone to plan there wouldn't really be much to talk about; the plan was to get to CERN around 9pm, check into the on-site Meyrin Hostel, and relax and get a good night's sleep. Unfortunately for me, but possibly fortunate to the many thousands of you I expect will be reading this blog, none of these things happened.

My day started in my house in Selly Oak, Birmingham around 9am. I got up, got my stuff together and set off for the airport. Often, in high season, you can fly directly from Birmingham to Geneva. Unfortunately for me high season seems to begin just after I needed to fly out. I had booked my journey to go via Paris, so my flight from Birmingham got me into Charles de Gaulles airport around 4pm CET. My flight to Geneva was due to take off at 6:30pm, a layover which I thought was a little too long, but actually appreciated in the end as it took some time to navigate the absolutely massive airport.

After several hours of waiting, till nearly 8pm, and being told the flight was delayed, but would still leave, the rest of the passengers and I were informed that they had cancelled our flight. What ensued was around 3 hours of pure chaos. When the dust settled I eventually was re-booked onto another flight, which I am sitting on now as I write this, leaving at 8:30am the next day. It took more than an hour and a half of standing in a long queue and listening to people argue with all of the airline staff to achieve this outcome. The only real upside is that I learnt a lot of colourful words in French. The matter of where I was sleeping was also settled by the airline, they put me up in an airport hotel a short shuttle bus ride away.

Of course this flight cancellation means I'm going to miss my 9am start tomorrow, and the welcome event that is being put on for all the summer students starting today. This is quite upsetting, but I emailed the people running the event and they have made arrangements to get me caught up on all the important information, which is obviously very nice. It's going to be an interesting rest of the day for sure, I'm especially looking forward to dragging 21kg of luggage halfway across Geneva when we land! Hopefully I'll be able to get another post up this evening or tomorrow morning, so tune in then to find out more...