Back to School!

For the past week and a half, I attended the 2009 CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. It was very satisfying to be in full-time learning mode for a while... a nice break from coding at my desk all the time :) We had some great speakers -- most of them took their charge very seriously, and you could tell that they put a lot of work and thought into their slides, even if they sometimes couldn't cram in all of the information they wanted to ;)

Here are some of my favorite photos/figures from the lectures (note that these are stolen from the ppt/pdf files at the link below). Hopefully they will give you a taste of the wide range of topics covered, and inspire you to investigate further :)

Visualization of Supersymmetry (Giudice):

We live in the golden region, and would only see the "shadows" from the superspace.

Groove caused by an errant beam in the SPS beam pipe (Wenninger):

The SPS is the ring that accelerates protons up to 450 GeV before they are injected into the LHC.

A healthy busbar, unlike the one that caused the September 19th incident... (Wenninger):

String breaking (Antinori):

The concept of strings is useful for describing pulling apart 2 quarks... eventually it becomes "easier" to pop a new quark-anti-quark pair out of the vacuum than to keep pulling.

Matter glacier (Servant):

Visible matter is the part of the glacier sticking out above the water, dark matter is hidden from view.

The ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker, lit up with a Sept 2008 splash event (Hoecker):

Do you see the Higgs? Ha ha, j/k.

The entire agenda is posted, including video! if you want to learn more.

A bientôt!