Tomo's Summer Adventures at CERN: The First 3 Days

I am sitting in my room at CERN right now writing this post and I could not be more excited about the current state of events.

The trip to CERN was pretty standard. My first flight was from Chicago to Amsterdam, and one thing I will say is that I was very impressed with Schipol Airport (outside of Amsterdam). When I got off the plane, it was like I had walked into a big mall. There were huge amounts of stores, a museum, and even a casino. Here are a couple pictures from the airport at Amsterdam:

Above is the museum. I tried as hard as I could to squeeze in all the words, and this is what I got.

And this is a picture of the casino that was in the airport.

I then hopped on a connecting flight from Amsterdam to Geneva, where I was picked up by my professor and taken to CERN.

My first impression of CERN was one of amazement. As we were driving in I was craning my neck to try to see all the mountains and scenery, and on the actual lab grounds I was fascinated by the variety of buildings...some just warehouses where accelerator components are built, others beautiful works of architecture. For the first couple days, I had to register, wait for internet access, and read a few papers to understand the detector I will be working on. In my free time, I decided to walk around and take a look at some of the buildings. Below are pictures:

This building is the hostel where I am living on CERN's campus. Its about a ten second walk from the main cafeteria.

This is the building with some of the main offices for ATLAS, the detector I am working on.

This is the inside of the ATLAS office building, looking up from the bottom.

This is a model of the ATLAS detector, whose actual proportions are much much larger.

There are a couple more touristy buildings with old detectors and other such things that I am planning on visiting in the next few days, so there will be more pictures at that time.

Today was the most exciting day for me. I got to go to the building that is on top of the real ATLAS detector (which is ~90 meters underground) and see the detector/control room. There are shafts in the building with small platforms over them that allow you to go out and look down at the detector, and it was pretty cool to see it. It was also interesting to note that the elevator to actually be able to go down into the detector cavern is controlled by an optical reader...meaning you have to get your eye scanned just to go down and work on the detector. I obviously do not have this authorization, so I couldn't go all the way down and see it.

My favorite part of the tour that Alberto (a postdoc in our group) gave me was the control room. This is a room with a series of rows of computers and monitors where data is taken and the detector is run. We went through all the programs that run the muon chambers, which are the specific part of the ATLAS detector I will be dealing with. I wanted to take pictures of the control room, but I was a little too timid with all the physicists running around and doing work.

In the process of the tours, I found out what projects I will be working on. First, we have a control panel for the drift tubes of the muon chambers that we would like to incoporate into a larger program that they use for general control of the detector during accelerator runs. Some of the code is there, but it has to be modified and incorporated into a panel in the larger program. This shouldn't take me too long, and its really an exercise in learning how we control the hardware of the detector with our software. The second project is actually much cooler, and it basically involves writing a program that will send signals to every single drift tube in the detector, and be able to tell us which are working and which aren't. I'm really excited about this, because it will be used frequently in the control room once the accelerator is up and running.

Phew...that was a long post. Now, I leave you with a few more pictures of scenic views from CERN. I will update again soon.