I met yesterday with Homer Neal, a University of Michigan professor, to choose a project to work on for the next couple of weeks. He had three options for me to choose from. The first was working with him. He is involved with studying the spin properties of the Lambda baryon composed of a bottom, down, and up quark via the ATLAS experiment. He proposed that I would look at the other experiments at the LHC to see what types of other projects regarding spin were happening. He also introduced to to a woman named Natalia who was working on supersymmetry. [View Full Entry]

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I have posted here photos of my visit to LHCb. They closed the tunnel to this experiment a couple days after my visit, so I barely made it in time! LHCb is an experiment that will study the beauty (also referred to as "bottom") quark in order to explain the relative lack of antimatter in the universe. Basically, the question it is trying to answer goes like this: When know that when matter meets antimatter, particles annihilate. We also know particles are created in particle-antiparticle pairs. So then, why is the universe, to the best of our knowledge, composed mostly of [View Full Entry]

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As promised, here are my photos from castle chillon, located in Montreux, Switzerland. Most of the captions were taken from the Chillon Castle brochure they gave us when we entered. [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone! I have put in this entry a brief description of what I have been working on this summer. More will follow once I have a good draft of a final paper that I can post a link to. I am working on ATLAS, which is a general purpose particle physics detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since ATLAS is a general purpose detector, scientists will use ATLAS to look for a variety of different things including the higgs boson, which is what physicists believe to be the origin of mass, as well as extra dimensions and [View Full Entry]

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I have had an incredibly busy two weeks. Last weekend, I took a weekend trip to Munich with my friends Brandi and Chen. It was raining the whole time we were there, but we still got to experience a lot. After leaving our bags at the hotel, we took a metro directly to the city center. All around us was the Christopher Street festival. I guess it happens once every year in Munich and is a really big festival within the gay community. Thousands of people were packed into the city center to experience it. So, we did what any tourists [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour! A lot has happened since I last wrote. Last week I got to go on an official visit of ATLAS. It is 7 stories tall . I couldn't see all of it because they have begun closing it up so they can start to run test beams in August. However, I did get my own personal tour and some cool photos. The CERN summer student lecture series also started last week. The lectures are wonderful and given by experts in the field. We have been learning about particle physics, accelerators, and detectors so far, as well as how all these [View Full Entry]

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I just got back from Interlaken. It was an amazing trip. We took the train up after work Friday, and made it to Interlaken around 10. Interlaken is an absolutely breathtaking town. It is completely surrounded by the Alps. We checked into our hostel, which was probably the best hostel ever. It was really clean, had free all you can eat breakfast, free bus passes, and free passes to the local pool. This morning, I woke up and went paragliding. I was incredibly nervous as we made our way up the mountain. Getting ready to run off the mountain was the [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday I got to go into the ATLAS experiment! It was quite the experience. The security there is incredibly high. They actually have a system that only lets you in if you are verified via a retina scan. It took me three tries to figure out just how to stand, etc. so that my retina scan would work properly. Renato, my advisor, says it took him three tries on his first time too. I can't tell if he made that up to make me feel better or if that was actually the case. I tired to figure out how to get [View Full Entry]

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For the past two days, we have been obsessing over travel plans. Tonight, we booked our very first weekend trip! Both of the Jeremys, Brice, Chen, Sam, and I are going to Barcelona the weekend of the 25th. Our flight and hotel combined cost about 300 francs/person. I think it is quite a steal and I am very excited to be going somewhere where my six years of spanish will come in use. Our hotel is a ten minute walk from the beach! Tomorrow, the boys are going to the train station over our lunch hour to book tickets to Paris. [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday I had a very low-key day. The last person in our group, Amanda, arrived. She goes to West Point and has a very short summer because of that; she will only be here for a month. However, she is the only girl here who has expressed interest in going shopping, so I plan to shop a lot for that month! After she arrived, a large group of us went walking in the vineyards that border the french part of CERN. It is still so much fun to be able to say I can walk to France! The vineyards are really [View Full Entry]

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