My first day here passed in a bleary haze as I was up at 5:20 am in Omaha for a 7 am flight, and I arrived here in Geneva at 7:45 am the next day. Factor in a seven hour time difference, but even so that's a long time to travel. Since the best way to cope with jet lag is to stay up until nightfall, I was nodding all day and didn't get much useful done (not for lack of trying).
The house I'm renting a room in is actually rather nice and contains the landlady (Yiota Folka), her daughter (whom I have yet to meet actually), a chinese american grad student (also have yet to meet), myself, and a cleaning lady. My room is lovely with its own doorway and floor (thus satisfying my requirements for a living space). Closet space and real indoor walls as a nice added touch. I'll try to post pictures soon. It is located in St. Genis, France which is only a little ways from CERN, just across the border in Switzerland. I will likely be riding my bike most of the time.
Being tired, Bjorn Nilsen (the post doc who is here with me for my first month) and I both took several walks around to keep awake which turned out to be very interesting. I got a nice impromptu tour around the main site since he had worked here for years, and included various awesome nerdy things like "this is the bubble chamber where the nobel prize for discovering neutral current was won" or "in there is the world's first networkable computer" and the like. Granted one can wonder what the first networkable computer was networked to before the second one came along, but regardless, it was nerdy cool.
Following a few hours of attempted working, I returned to the house and slept for a good 13 hours. The next day I was considerably more awake which was good because the really cool stuff began. Bjorn took me to site two which is where the ALICE experiment is, 80 meters underground.
For a bit of background, the LHC (which was completed and turned on for the first time not too long ago) is the world's largest particle accelerator, 27 kilometers around and down to a depth of 172 meters underground (depending where you are). What they do here amounts to taking either protons or heavy ions (led, gold, other nuclei) and smashing them into each other at something around 99.99999% the speed of light and watching what happens. ALICE is one of the experiments that uses a mess of different detectors, built above ground and lowered 80 meters down a pit to be installed in the experiment itself, to detect what is going on.
The ALICE experiment:
He toured me around the ALICE site which was full of scientists doing sciency things on the computers, large buildings for building things, and lots of storage. Even a little BBQ stuck out of the way for nice weather. The main building contains the control room where the experiment (oddly enough) is controlled from. Around and above the control room are stations where the various detector experts do their thing like design new and better interfaces and fix what is broken as needed. The EMCal (Electromagnetic Calorimeter) that I am learning to be an expert on has its station on the second level. Outside of this area, but still inside the greater building, is the assembly hall which is a wide open space with a crane that can lower things down into a pit that leads to the experiment itself.
From the bottom up is experiment, , 8 or 10 feet of concrete blocks to block radiation, lots of platforms of electronics that control the detectors and talk to the control room, open air, ground level. Air is pumped down there via large pipes so people can breathe and it takes special training to be able to go down to the experiment. Sadly it will be a while before I can get down there because while I will have some of the training, I won't have a radiation badge and thus cannot go down unless everything is open, which it will be in January when they are installing some new components.
Up to this point I had been feeling rather woebegone and homesick (as always happens whenever I go somewhere new to stay a while) but the moment I went in the control room, I suddenly had found something familiar. For those who don't know I spend six months at a similar, if smaller, experiment called STAR on Long Island at Brookhaven National Lab. It has similar big words thrown around and many of the same acronyms (SVT, SMD, UPC, ZDCHV, ZOMGWTFISTHAT, and the like). Being somewhere where I at least knew what was going on, somewhere similar to a place that I had already powered through the angst phase of moving, was extremely helpful.
We then returned to the main site and I went to start my paperwork.
The paperwork is located in the CERN User's Center near the aptly named Restaurant 1. As I walked there I discovered that the sun had come out and with it came the smell of flowers, cut grass, fall foliage, and cars in a blend that I can only describe as Industrial Lucky Charms, which is exactly the smell that lucky charms would have if they were a fossil fuel. Maybe it was the restaurant experimenting with something. Or a chemical spill. Whatever it was it was all pervasive.
I didn't do much else today beyond go shopping for food in Geneva (a very pretty city for those of you who have never been) and do paperwork. Geneva is hideously expensive and St. Genis not much better. I will check in the next time something interesting happens and hopefully will have some pictures I didn't find online to share before too long.
Ciao!
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