Collaboration Portraits

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Pauline and her mother, the only person who thinks Pauline is tall at 1.65 m. Since her mother dislikes being the shortest on every picture, Pauline has her knees bent to be of equal height, making her mother very happy!

When exactly did her interest in science start, Pauline Gagnon cannot say. "I always wanted to know what matter was made of,” she explains. Inspired by Marie Curie, her first choice was chemistry. No wonder that nine-year-old Pauline's dearest wish for Christmas was a chemistry kit. Unfortunately it said "Recommended for ages 10 and older" on the box. So her parents opted for a microscope instead and she had to wait another year to start chemistry experiments. "The best experiment was the one producing rotten egg smell - the whole family could tell it had been successful,” she recalls. She kept the mortar and pestle from that chemistry kit and uses it today to ground spices.

That summer, her aunt told her about a new television show called: ‘Atoms and Galaxies’ due to start the following September. She thought these would be the main characters in a new adventure series so waited with anticipation. What a disappointment to find a rather boring man in a lab coat talking about absolutely incomprehensible stuff, as was common in the sixties. So she gave up after only one show.

In high school, her sister could not quite understand why Pauline was so attracted by chemistry “Why chemistry, at least physics is interesting!” Since she was one year older, she ought to know.

Pauline started studying physics without a clue what she could do with it and lacking support in general, although her mother had always encouraged her daughters to study, having herself gotten her degree after raising her five kids. “But it was very typical for French Canadians at that time not to set their hopes too high,” Pauline explains. “Being a minority, French Canadians had less of a future. So none of my professors ever encouraged me to go any further than a bachelor degree.”

She started writing for a science magazine to pay for her studies. “There was never a summer job for me so I created my own as a science writer.” She finished her education with a bachelor in physics and taught in a college for the following six years. She would have stayed, but life had other plans: “I fell in love, quit my job and drove 7000 km to move to California,” Pauline remembers. There, her friend suggested a visit to SLAC. Being very impressed and once again having to support herself, she decided to write an article about it. She phoned SLAC press office and made an appointment. “Here I was with my small tape-recorder - a total unknown, writing for an unknown magazine in Quebec. I could barely speak English and barely knew about quarks and gluons. And who did they line me up with but Martin Perl, who got the Nobel prize ten years later, Jonathan Dorfan, who became SLAC director and Helen Quinn, one of their most prestigious theorist!”

This was the main inspiration for going back to school. California also provided a very supportive climate for re-entry students. “One never knows where falling in love might lead you to!” So Pauline applied for a master in physics at San Francisco State University. “When I came to register, the department chair noticed I had taught in a college for many years. As they were short of a lecturer, he hired me on the spot. Teaching in English was very tough for me though as I always read the equations in French, even in English textbooks. Luckily there was always a kind student to read the equations aloud for me and slowly I learned the terms,” Pauline recalls. “While taking a quantum mechanics class, I paid more attention to how the professor read the equations than to the lecture.”

After completing her PhD in Santa Cruz, Pauline eventually came to CERN with her partner to work on the OPAL experiment and joined the Indiana University group in 1999. “I came for a year - 16 years ago.” About five years ago, Peter Jenni asked her to be ATLAS e-News editor. "That was a great opportunity! When I took over, there were four issues a year but so much was happening, I proposed to do one issue a month. Soon, Ceri Perkins, Colin Barras and Christina Jimenez came on board, and we started covering every aspects, including social events and outreach issues. There is so much information in ATLAS, the goal is to give an ‘ executive summary’ - a kind of snapshot of what is happening.”

Over the last four years, Pauline split her time between research, ATLAS e-News and outreach. “I always enjoyed communication as a teacher, giving lectures to the general public, being an ATLAS guide or talking with journalists. Doing outreach keeps me in contact with reality.”

It was her idea to mark International Women's Day on 8 March 2010 at CERN, also followed by Fermilab. By showing how many women are working on the LHC, Pauline hopes to send an encouraging message to young women interested in science. In 2009, she suggested to a group of ATLAS women to join the ‘Expand your horizon’ program in Geneva, where women scientists led hands-on workshops for young girls to inspire scientific careers.

To balance the long hours in front of her computer, Pauline loves all kinds of outdoor sports: running, biking, hiking and skiing - everything that can be done outside no matter the weather conditions. She participated in several runs, the longest being the Geneva marathon in 4:38 hours, and the strangest, a half marathon ending at 1:00 am in Tromso, Norway under pouring rain and not the advertised midnight sun!

Last December, Pauline decided to step down as ATLAS e-News editor: "It's time to give someone else the chance to bring their own new ideas," she says as she now plans to spend more time on her other interests.

Teresa Fonseca Martin

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:46:07 +0000

Teresa Fonseca Martin

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 25/01/2011 - 16:46

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Teresa Fonseca Martin

Has cooking something to do with physics? Sure! There is a difference, if the meal is cooked in a clay pot or in a metal pot. In a clay pot it will take longer to heat the food up, but then the temperature will stay for a long time, even thought the oven is turned off. On the contrary the metal pot will heat up much faster, but as soon the pot is removed from the oven, the heat is nearly gone.

Teresa Fonseca Martin remembers vividly that her mother used a clay pot very often to prepare the meals. But more important for her was her father's conclusion: “‘Everything is physics’, my father used to say,” Teresa recalls with a smile. “He is an architect, now he is retired, not a scientist. He is interested in everything and very active.” She inherited this curiosity, as well as her love for good food. “I was born and spent my childhood in Ourense, a small village in Galicia in the Northwest of Spain, by the Atlantic Ocean. People say it looks like Ireland with all the green hills. We have fantastic seafood and fish there.”

In grammar school she was not only interested in science but in all the other subjects: history, art, Galician literature, Latin... but history and physics were the most interesting for her. “I was always curious to understand the world,” Teresa explains. “So I was hesitating between history, to understand the behaviour of men or physics to understand the behaviour of matter.”

She had to move to Santiago de Compostela to continue her education. Due to her physics teacher at high school, her interest struck toward physics. Her teacher was very fond of CERN even though he had never been there himself.

As undergraduate in 1999 Teresa joined the experiment NA59 at CERN and stayed for two months in Geneva. The spokesperson of this experiment, Mayda Velasco, offered her a PhD position in the US at the Northwestern University near Chicago, where she finished her thesis on “First observation of the decay of K_S into pi0 mu+ mu- in the NA48/1 experiment at CERN” in 2005. “I loved the years I spent in Chicago: it is a great city,” Teresa recalls.

She spent two years at CERN as a research fellow, then as research assistant at Royal Holloway University of London, and started to work for the university in Bern this year. “I like challenges and changes and I love to learn new things,” Teresa explains. “And CERN building the new collider was the place to be as a physicist. ” She works for the SUSY trigger, doing analysis and building links between SUSY and the Trigger. “With the higher luminosity we have to make sure that, although we have to cut harder, the most interesting events are still covered,” Teresa explains. “That means a lot of meetings, e-mails and shifts,” she adds smiling.

Teresa has based in Geneva for the last five years. She lives downtown Geneva, near to restaurants and - even more important - in walking distance of the movies. But she is not at all interested in the latest Hollywood movies. “The last film I saw was “Biutiful” by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. It is the story of a man that doesn't have a proper job fighting for his kids, he has a tough life and he is not an angel. It is a terribly sad story but a very good movie with social contents, remembering us how tough life is for many people without falling in angelical characters.” Another of her hobbies is reading - and there her history-loving side shows, as her last book, “Ines y la alegria” (“Ines and happiness”) by Almudena Grandes, tells the story of a woman (and all the people that surround her) from the Spanish civil war in Madrid in 1936 until the eighties when she comes back to Spain after being exiled in France.

Of course, living in Switzerland means mountains as well. “I love the sight of the mountains, which I did not know when I came to Switzerland. But I am not very sportive,” she admits. “I am still learning to ski with the CERN Ski club and avoid skiing the black pistes.” Another of her hobbies is travelling, that is for her not staying in fancy hotels or being pampered in a spa. Her kind of holiday is a more adventurous one: “I traveled with a backpack and in public transport in Columbia and Chile, when I was in Latin America. I collaborated via email, phone and Skype with people from Colombia, Universidad Antonio Narino for a few months before going there in September 2007. I was working in Bogot, Colombia for one month the last month of my CERN research fellow contract as a postdoc with the HELEN fellowship from the European Union. Then I stayed two months traveling mostly in Colombia on unpaid holidays before starting as a research assistant in RHUL. At that time I also went three weeks to Chile, I worked one week with the people of Santiago de Chile (PUC) also in ATLAS, and then traveled there for a couple of weeks.”

For her future - hopefully permanent - position she would like to be more involved in the analysis, as she has just started working with DAQ. “Maybe in a Mediterranean country.” Going back to North or Latin America would be an option as well. But for the more immediate future, Teresa is simply looking forward to her conference in Lake Louise, Canada, at the end of January.

Martin Rybar

Steven Goldfarb — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Martin Rybar

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Wed, 15/12/2010 - 01:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Martin demonstrating an experiment with liquid nitrogen during summer school of astronomy at the Upice observatory

Martin demonstrating an experiment with liquid nitrogen during summer school of astronomy at the Upice observatory.

There is usually a defining moment, or event, that leads a person to science. For 10 year old Martin Rybar, it was the moment when he found the chemistry laboratory kit from his uncle in his parents' house. Curiosity has always been the main driving force in science – and Martin was no exception.

“There was no chemistry book or any instruction manual. So my first experiment was to mix everything together and see what happens.” he recalls smiling “Luckily there were no acid components included, so there was no danger that I could create some explosives and destroy the house.”

Driven to explore and discover, Martin installed his little laboratory down in the cellar, where he spent hours of experimenting – first just by himself and later, with a schoolmate. “My parents did not really understand what was going on. But they supported me. Luckily my mother worked as a nurse, so when I was running out of ingredients, she got me some from the hospital.” The chemistry experiments also had an impact on his school career as he could show some of his solutions in class.

Martin was interested in “the whole science” - biology, mathematics as well as physics. It was during grammar school that physics took more and more the priority. “Our physics teacher stayed in touch with Charles University where he studied physics. He made us participate in physics competition using tests and problems to be solved [that] he received every month from his university,” Martin remembers.

Another impact on his raising interest in physics came from a summer school where he participated in an astronomy class for two weeks during the summer. They had star gazing lessons in the observatory of Upice.

As it is his credo that scientists should aim not only to explore, but also to be recruiters and trainers, Martin decided to become an instructor at this summer school. “In 2006, I started to organise the Astronomická Expedice Summer School and since 2009 I am the main organiser. I manage different lessons and lead groups of people.” To create science addicts who maybe one day will decide to pursue a career in science like him, and maybe contribute to some discovery.

When he started his studies at Charles University in Prague, he first applied for astronomy. But during the first two years, while he studied general physics, he found out that the particle physics department was much better suited than astronomy when it came to finding a subject for his thesis. And that's where he chose to work on "Jets in pp and PbPb collisions at LHC".

As modules of the Semiconductor Tracker were tested at Charles University, Martin was trained as a shifter on the SCT detector. “I started to work on trigger for heavy-ion collisions, because it was an uncovered area in the Heavy Ion program,” he explains “[CERN] is an amazing place for everything.”

And this is now truer than ever. Martin just started his PhD this year at Charles University. Unlike most students on ATLAS, he did not have to wait long for his data. Not only that, but he stumble over the most interesting effect observed so far! “Usually I travel to CERN to do shifts (on SCT sub-detector) but this time I came to participate on analysis of the first data. And then we had a stable beam for one week and collected so much data. I did not expect this so fast. It is just perfect that this happens at the beginning of my thesis,” he says enthusiastically “Publishing the paper was so exciting. Everyday meetings with Fabiola and in the restaurant, we were very silent, as we could not mention this event in public.” He grins.

In his spare time, he likes to do downhill skiing and hiking. “And I like watching science fiction movies, everything that is playing in the future with aliens. I love to watch Stargate SG1 and Starwars.” Meanwhile, his interest in astronomy remained intact: “I have still my telescope, but the air around Prague is so light-polluted, that star gazing is not possible. And for bringing it to Geneva, it is too heavy.” But luckily there are these two weeks at the Astronomická Expedice Summer School…

Genevieve Steele

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:01:25 +0000

Genevieve Steele

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 30/11/2010 - 17:01

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Genevieve Steele

Eight-year-old Genevieve Steele was a little girl who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to play the harp. As soon as she first spotted one, while clog dancing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on England's south coast, she pretty much didn't let it out of her sight.

“Whenever I wasn't on stage, I basically followed this poor harpist around!” she laughs. “He noticed me and gave me a go in the end, which was very nice of him.” Captivated by the beautiful resonating sound, Gen, who already played piano and violin by that point, set about convincing her parents to let her take lessons. “They were hesitant about such an unwieldy instrument, and tried to persuade me that I might prefer the flute,” she remembers.

They were fighting a losing battle though, and Gen was adamant about her choice. In what may have been a crafty move to keep the peace, her parents relented and agreed that if they could find her a teacher near their home - a little old mining village outside of Durham, northeast England - then she could have lessons.

“I think they thought that it was an unusual enough an instrument for them to be truthfully able to say that no teacher could be found,” she considers. But they didn't account for their daughter's determination. When the Yellow Pages failed her, Gen set about asking all the music teachers she knew through school and friends. Eventually she found a teacher in the next town, with a handy harp hire service. “I told my Mum about that, and she gave in,” she grins.

Learning didn't present much of a problem for Gen, who had been playing piano since age five: “It was kind of the same, but twisted on its side.” And unlike a lot of children, she loved to practice. “I was one of those people - I think I still am - that I have to do lots to be able to do anything,” she considers. “If I do nothing, it spreads out to fill all my time. I realised that very early on, so I'd always be doing something, so that I'd get lots done.”

A couple of years down the line, Gen had her very own 34-string Celtic harp (clarsach in Gaelic). “There was a brand that I really liked that also did a kit - they give you the chunks of wood that make the harp and the strings. My Dad's quite good at that sort of thing - his Dad was a carpenter - so he made it for me.”

Before university, her studies were focussed on maths, physics and music. Science won out as a career choice though, although she did play as a soloist at weddings and events during her undergraduate degree, as a means of earning some money.

It was the investigative nature of physics that hooked her. “And being able to explain things in a nice formula and see how it all interacts.” She studied for her four-year Physics Masters at Durham University and continued living at home with her parents. But she got her first taste of CERN in 2007 as a third year summer student, checking and installing muon chambers with the Munich group.

Now she's back at CERN full time, and is in the third year of her PhD with the University of Glasgow. She spends her time studying hadronic Tau decays and babysitting Tier 0 on distributed computing shifts, watching data coming off the detector and starting to be reconstructed. She lives in Thoiry, a “prettier version” of her home village, with her French LHC physicist boyfriend. When asked if they discuss physics over dinner, she delivers a resolute “no”.

Being at CERN isn't her only experience of living away from home though. There was the year she spent as a half-elf, living and working at a children's adventure camp in the English midlands. Although the days were long, she loved working with ten-year-olds. “They're brave enough to be away from their Mum and Dad without crying, but still young enough so that you can lie to them!” she says with a little mischief. She had fun telling wide-eyed children that she was genetically half elf, and was easily able to substantiate that claim, in their eyes, by firing off perfect bullseyes in their archery lessons.

Of all the outdoor activities she enjoyed there, it was kayaking that really stuck with Gen. She's not had much chance to explore the white waters around Geneva yet, but she brought her kayak over with her, along with her faithful harp which was strapped into her car with a seatbelt. She was just moving out here when the ATLAS CD was being recorded and, in the spirit of throwing herself into her new life, she jumped on board with that. That's more than can be said for the harp itself, which was misbehaving and slipping out of tune frequently in the recording studio.

“It's quite a temperamental instrument,” she explains. “It doesn't like being moved, it doesn't like changes of temperature.” And it really didn't like the humid Geneva summer: “It threw a hissy fit and snapped all of its strings. In the end I just couldn't play it, I had to slacken off all the strings and leave it alone.”

Thankfully, she had other musical pursuits to fill the void. She sings in a choir and is a member of an amateur operatic group, whose pantomime (“It's quite good fun. It's very silly”) she'll perform in at the start of December. Unlike some musically inclined physicists, the realms of music and maths are separate for Gen, except for when she starts to muse on harmonics and other technicalities.

“That's why the harp sounds so nice,” she smiles, still as entranced by it as her eight-year-old self. “It's very hard to make it sound bad when everything just resonates.”

Regina Kwee

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:07:48 +0000

Regina Kwee

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 15/11/2010 - 17:07

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Regina Kwee

Year 2000, which was declared as the “year of physics” in Germany, was the very year, when Regina Kwee finished high school with the German Abitur in Berlin. She and a friend visited the particle physics exhibition “Trip to the Big Bang” and this may well have triggered her interest for this field. She was very much interested in physics, although she had an humanistic education with focus on ancient Greek and Latin. “But for both [fields] one needs an analytical approach”, Regina emphasizes. Unfortunately her last physics teacher had not succeeded in sparking her interest: ”He never explained things properly, books were much more trustworthy. He was even surprised we knew about neutrinos!” So for this reason Regina was happy to finally meet physicists who did answer all her questions. ”Christoph Rembser was among these physicists whom we pestered with questions”, she remembers ”and now I am at CERN and we both work for the same experiment!”

Despite that positive experience with ”real physicists”, Regina fell unprepared to study physics but also wanted to do something applied and useful. So she first did an 11-week training at Daimler-Chrysler Werke in Mannheim, where she enjoyed screwing engines together and learned about fuel cells and alternative engines. She started her studies at the Applied University (FH) in Berlin in Electrotechnique and Energy Systems. “My goal was to work on regenerative energies, I wanted to learn about new, environmental friendly technologies and make them used, but I realised the FH was not the right place for that. Often one had to leave the real answers to mathematicians or physicists.” During the semester break, she did more practical training for the FH in the electronic group of DESY Zeuthen. “It was great there, I also met many enthusiastic physicists”, Regina recalls.

After this two week training, Regina decided to go into physics and signed up at the Humboldt University in Berlin. “We were a just a small group of around 40 physics students. Our professor Lutz Schimansky-Geier supported us very much - in his way, giving us a lot of extra exercises and lessons” she smiles, so “After the Vordiplom, only 10 students were left, me among them and we stayed until the final exam.”

“What fascinates me in physics is to get to the limits of imagination. During my studies I learnt that so many abstract, mathematical concepts are actually applied in nature.” In 2005 she spent two semesters in Lausanne studying physics at the EPFL “to get another point of view on physics” - but also to learn another language that is actually still spoken.

She returned to Berlin in 2006 to finish her studies and joined the DESY group that had just become part of ATLAS. “In the beginning, we were just two diploma students and the seniors. But this turned out to be actually good: my supervisor, Klaus Mönig, knew the group had only little experience on the ATLAS software. So whenever we needed to talk with the experts, we were sent to them. This way, I had the chance to travel to the U.K. and several times to CERN. This boosted my work a lot.” Regina finished her diploma thesis on the “Development of Inner Detector Minimum Bias Triggers in ATLAS” a year later in autumn 2007.

Since January 2008, she has been a CERN doctoral student with the Gentner-Programme. In her thesis, she started by continuing on minimum bias triggers and finishing the implementation of the trigger. "I worked with so many highly professional people. I really appreciate this atmosphere.” She plans to complete her PhD by the end of the year and is currently writing up her thesis.

In her spare time, she learned snowboarding “I had to when I was in Lausanne, but it was fun with the EPFL guys, even though I was more sitting in the snow than standing on the board in the beginning”.

Regina has an artistic side as well, so in the Summer, one can spot her in the fields of Meyrin with her easel, palette and brushes. ”I had art in high-school and some of my art teachers were very committed. They organized excursions and exhibitions where we showed our paintings. I even sold some paintings!” she grins. “With a friend I knew from EPFL, we transformed an attic into a studio. Unfortunately we use it much too seldom.”

What are her plans after her PhD? “I joined ATLAS in its start-up phase, now I am ready to do more data analysis!” So a postdoc would be a nice option. “But I am also open to other, more applied fields - as long as it fascinates me” she smiles. Regina has not yet made up her mind between research or going into industry - just keeping her options open.

Takanori Kono

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Takanori Kono

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 01/11/2010 - 01:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Takanori Kono

There are many paths into science and one that might have played a key role for Takanori Kono could be LEGO bricks. Maybe it is the segmented approach learned from playing with those bricks that helped him later on tackle computer programming. It is easier to break down any problem into smaller chunks, seeing how it is put together as though it were made from basic building blocks.

“As a kid I played a lot with Lego. I remember that I did recreate my whole neighbourhood with LEGO and with practice, I could achieve realism with increasing complexity. I added second and third floors, and backyards to my buildings.” he recalls.

Due to his father's business, the family left Japan and lived in California when Takanori was between six and ten years old. It was during that time, he learned origami. “With LEGO, you start with only bricks and an assembling plate, with origami you start with a piece of paper”, Takanori explains. The goal of origami is to transform a flat sheet of material into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques. Traditional Japanese origami has been practiced since the Edo era between 1603 and 1867. Today, more and more teachers have been developing ways to use origami to teach concepts in math, chemistry, physics and architecture.

At the age of seven, his father taught him shogi, a kind of Japanese chess. He became so good at it, that he won a prize at the city tournament for elementary school students two years in a row. “But both were bronze medals unfortunately,” he says modestly.

Since shogi is rather limited, he learned to play GO, a game he still plays often today – but mostly against the computer.

When Takanori started his university studies in Tokyo in 1995, he did not have physics in mind. Japanese universities work differently: students just decide about their overall subject, like natural sciences or law or medicine, and then make up their mind during their first years.

So for Takanori it was natural sciences, which included chemistry, mathematics as well as physics. In 1997, he finally chose fundamental physics. “Probably, the reason I decided to go into physics research and especially particle physics, is that I was so impressed by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics when I was an undergraduate,” Takanori recalls. “Especially, if you learn relativity, the formulation of the theory looks just correct but the consequence of it is contradictory to our common sense. Although things look weird sometimes, we are not talking about science-fiction but the real world and it still looks like there is more fundamental truth out there.”

After learning more about modern experimental particle physics, Takanori joined the ZEUS experiment. “I liked the idea of probing the structure of the proton with a large electron microscope, which is what was done at HERA.” So this is where he did his PhD work with the University of Tokyo. After graduation in 2004, he joined the ATLAS experiment, first with the University of Oxford group where he worked on the construction of the SCT and its alignment system and then as a CERN fellow.

“The construction of the SCT was finished by summer 2005, and we had to wait for a few months to install the detector into ATLAS. So I started working in the trigger group with CERN” he explains and goes on: “In 2006, we were just starting the integration of various components and I was actually the first one to run a High Level Trigger (HLT) [algorithm] online at point 1. Now we have hundreds of selection algorithms [running] together for data-taking. I was involved heavily during this process and it was really nice to see the progress and feel involved.”

In 2009, Takanori left CERN and moved to Hamburg for his current post-doc position. ”As the real experiment seemed imminent, I thought moving away from CERN and spending less time on operational work and more on data analysis would be nice. However, I'm still involved quite a lot on the trigger menu business” he admits but also adds that he likes living in big cities. So now he commutes between Hamburg and Geneva frequently, as every second month he is back at CERN, taking shifts and working on the trigger menu.

After just a year in Hamburg, he is still exploring the city,enjoying the sightseeing. For his future, Takanori would like to stay in Europe, maybe in Hamburg...

Valeria Perez Reale

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:13:02 +0000

Valeria Perez Reale

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 19/10/2010 - 17:13

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Valeria Perez Reale

Physicists are elderly men, wearing white lab coats and looking a bit like Einstein - that was the way most kids draw physicists before their visit to CERN. But, thanks to Valeria Perez Reale and her colleagues who participated in the 'Draw me a physicist' program, the way these kids see scientists changed forever. “I was happy to be interviewed and sketched by 8 years old from the Geneva and Pays de Gex area, who had never visited CERN before,” Valeria says. She adds, “It fills me with satisfaction to see young children interested in science and the pleasure when they learn new things that change the way they see their universe around them.”

In her spare time, Valeria Perez Reale does some outreach work for ATLAS and CERN. “I have taken hundreds of visitors to the ATLAS cavern and control room and other experiments. I think it is our duty to explain to the general public what we do at CERN,” she says.

On the 24th of September, she was part of the Researchers' Night, where teenagers signed-up to be physicists for a night, and visited the ATLAS control room. “Monika Wielers and I gave the master class and it was a pleasure to see teenagers give up their Friday night to come to ATLAS and analyze data!” she remembers enthusiastically.

Valeria was born in the Argentinean Pampas but at age four she and her family moved to the US because her father had to finish his Master thesis at the University of Minnesota. They stayed three years, then moved back to Argentina, where she had to re-learn to speak Spanish! The family moved to the US again when Valeria was nine year old. She only spoke Spanish at the time and had to learn English in school. “Not talking the language, the only subjects I could compete (in) were mathematics and physics,” she remembers. When she was 14 year old, they moved back to Argentina where she had to re-learn to speak Spanish! “This taught me to adapt quickly to new cultures, I think this is also were I learned that a 'smile' is a universal language,” she says smiling and adds: “I have now lived a third of my life in the USA, a third in Argentina and a third in Switzerland.”

So, what led Valeria to further become interested in science? Well, her first choice after finishing high school was medicine, but during her preparation for exams she got more and more interested in physics. “Physics is the base of everything,” as Valeria puts it. She participated in different summer schools in Spain and Brazil, but it was at CERN, where she took part in the summer student program, that she made up her mind to pursue high energy physics. “Those were exciting times and that's when I fell in love with the search for the Higgs and the international environment of the HEP collaborations,” Valeria recalls nostalgically and continues, “I returned to CERN in 2002 to do my PhD at Bern University on the ATLAS experiment.” After her PhD, she joined the ATLAS experiment as a CERN Fellow for the trigger group where she was nominated co-convener of the electron and photon trigger group. When Argentina joined the ATLAS collaboration in 2006 she worked with several students from Argentinean universities to setup the photon triggers. “My main contribution was the development of the physics photon triggers for initial running, strategy for different luminosities and work on the search for the Higgs boson,” Valeria explains.

In 2008 she joined Columbia University and the Pixel detector, where she was involved in the detector calibration and commissioning. “Tuning the 80 million channels is important to assure good quality of data. In the ATLAS control room I have been working in Standard Model prompt photon measurements. I am currently (an) Editorial Board member for two Exotics analyses in preparation for publication this year.

Valeria isn't 'all science all the time though. In summer, she loves to be by the lakeside, walking or jogging after work. 'It is so relaxing to see the sunset with the reflections of the Mont-Blanc and the Salève in the water of Lac Lèman. And in winter I love going to the opera in Geneva. One of my favorites was a modern French opera 'L'étoile.' I am not a mountain person, therefore I have to say, (even if it's been years since I live in the region), that I do not like skiing in winter or hiking in summer,” she admits.

Her absolute favorite hobby is dancing. “Already from when I was 5 year old, my mother signed me up for a tap dance class. Then I did some Spanish flamenco, belly dancing and samba,” Valeria says, obviously very happy to discuss it. The dance she really fell in love with though is Argentinean tango. “I learned the dance in Argentina, I met an exceptional man dancing in Geneva, and, since 'it takes two to tango,' I married him!” she says with a big smile. “The nice thing about this hobby is that tango is popular and can be found in any corner of the world. During the ATLAS Copenhagen Week my husband and I heard some tango music in the city on a Friday night. We followed the music and found an open air Milonga in front of the bay and started dancing!” Dancing under the stars - what could be better?

Frederick Luehring

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Frederick Luehring

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 04/10/2010 - 02:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Fred with one of his furry feline friends

Fred with one of his furry feline friends.

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all remember Neil Armstrong saying while taking his first steps on the moon. As so many, Fred Luehring was glued to the television set that 21st of June, 1969, but to him this event meant much more than to most. “My mother was [very] interested in the rocket launches of the Apollo Program, and so she encouraged my interest in science by watching the moon launches on TV [with me],” he remembers and continues, “I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, actually fairly close to Fermilab.” It was an advantageous place to be for the budding physicist.

His father had a different career in mind for his son but, convinced by Fred's good marks in mathematics and physics, he supported his son's wish to study physics. “I always did well in school, especially in math and science. My high school physics teacher first interested me in physics. So when I went to Northwestern University I majored in physics. I ended up doing undergraduate, graduate, and post doctoral work at Northwestern University, (a private university in Evanston Illinois, right next to Chicago). “At this point in my career I worked on small fixed target experiments,” Fred recalls. During his student years he met his wife, who studied music at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, “... one of the three best music schools in the US.” He finished his Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics in 1986.

During his studies Frederick joined a subway fan club in Chicago called the Central Electric Railfans' Association, where he worked in the repair shop and helped to maintain their historic wagons. Fred clearly has a passion for these trains, and explained some of the historical bits about them. For example, Chicago's metro is known as the ‘L’ because most of its network is elevated. Some stretches of today's system date back to the end of the 19th Century when Chicago followed New York's example to construct elevated rail lines. Whereas New York started early in the 20th Century to put all elevated lines in Manhattan underground, Chicago maintained most of its original routes, and still has to this day. Since 1892, four different companies have operated the elevated lines in the north, west and south parts of the city centre, using steam engines in the early years. All of the lines spread out from the city centre where some of them form the famous elevated loop, now one of the city's landmarks. Fred is still fascinated by these historic constructions made out of such strong iron structures. In fact, one day he would like to travel to Wuppertal, to take a ride on their famous ‘Schwebebahn’ which was built in 1900, and which is now the oldest monorail system in the world. Interestingly, it is still in use today as a local transport system.

From 1986 to 1990 Fred worked as a research associate at Northwestern University, at Fermilab, Batavia, IL. “When my post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern ended, I found a job programming simulations of the tracking system for SDC which was one of the experiments at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) that was being built in Texas.” Unfortunately that project was cancelled after only three years. Starting as a physicist and scientific programmer at the Indiana University, Bloomington in 1990 he recalled how he came to ATLAS. “I ended up, (after a series of twists and turns), working on ATLAS at LHC starting in early 1994. In 2003 I ran into Markus Elsing and together we set-up the work on the so-called [new] tracking project. Since then, I have worked exclusively on ATLAS, first on simulation of the TRT, then computing and grid, and currently on Monitoring the TRT.” From 1995-2007 Fred held the post of ATLAS TRT Software Coordinator and was, “... consumed by Grid computing stuff.” Thus, it is not at all surprising to find Grid computing as main interest on his facebook page, with a link to a GRID information page.

Since 2004 Fred has been a senior scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He lives in Bloomington as well, in a small college town in the southern region of the U.S. state. Of about 69,291 inhabitants, about 40,000 of them are students. He and his wife share their apartment with their favourite pets: cats. “The number of cats [has] changed over the years. Once we had seven cats, then down to one, and now there are five cats. Both of us volunteered for ten years in a animal shelter and now all of our cats are stray cats from a shelter,” he says, and you can tell by how he says it that he cares deeply for all of the shelter's animals' well being. His cats, Mongo (the one on the photo), Billie, Suky and Cleo share opposite sides of the sofa or chase with one another. Minnie is their rebel cat with a not-so-healthy appetite. Over the years Minnie kept growing bigger and bigger, and she now weighs about 7 kilos! For this reason it seemed obvious that she had to be renamed... to Maxie. At around 5.5 kilos, the other cats also let her know that she would have to find her own sofa, unless she started jogging or something. She has not done so.

Starting in 1981 as graduate student, and continuing up to present day, Fred has worked for nearly 30 years as a practising physicist. He has learned a great deal in those 30 years, but his most central scientific conviction is clear. Fred thinks that, “The most important quality... a scientist can have is scepticism. One must test every theory with observation and never take any idea as an indisputable truth.“

Kathy Copic

Steven Goldfarb — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:18:37 +0000

Kathy Copic

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Wed, 22/09/2010 - 17:18

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Kathy in Cassis, a small town near Marseilles.

Maybe it snuck into her subconscious while she was wandering the geometrically perfect street plan of her native Euclid (yes, named after the famous 'Father of Geometry') near Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe it rubbed off on her as she discovered the intricacies of risk and probability while dealing smoky late night blackjack for her father's casino equipment hire business. Or maybe it was just pure chance. But one way or another, mathematics is in Kathy Copic's bones.

This realisation was slow to dawn though and, after enduring solid but uninspiring high school science teachers, Kathy started college at Cornell as a Government major. “I wanted to do [that] because I could understand the job of government: making things better for people. I like that,” she says with conviction. “I didn't understand what the job of a scientist was - or that research was still ongoing and that there was stuff still to do and not just balls rolling down wedges.”

But she soon became disillusioned with how government was taught at her university, where the classes seemed to be “totally divorced from math and reality”. Classmates laxly quoting statistics they didn't know the origin of, and professors who didn't bother to correct them left Kathy feeling out of place.

“Trying to care about statistics, in a culture where no-one else seemed to, was one of the things that pushed me towards physics, where people really care about getting the right answer,” she says. “I took a bunch of math classes because I liked math, and that should have been the tip-off for me that I should have been going into a more quantitative field.”

This, combined with seeing her science major peers doing interesting undergraduate research, meant that by the end of her third year she was ready to shake things up. “I didn't actually know anyone in physics. I just liked the idea of physics,” she smiles, citing the fact that it seeks to answer the most basic fundamental questions, but has the 'testable' element which is missing from pure maths. “It's a thing that a lot of physicists say, but that I think is true for me too.”

She took her first physics classes at this juncture, and then focussed on physics and maths for the following two years so that she could apply for physics grad school. After five years of college, she finished with a double major in maths and government.

Although her unusual path meant that certain undergrad physics classes had to wait until she began her PhD, Kathy did manage to build in some experimental work on CESR, Cornell's electron-positron collider. This solid research experience, she believes, helped bag her a year's “predoc” work (not an official term, “I just made it up!”) at Berkeley with BABAR and ATLAS, before starting PhD studies on CDF with the University of Michigan.

As a Columbia postdoc, Kathy moved to Geneva to work on ATLAS in May 2007, and got involved with the Liquid Argon calorimeter, repairing the front end boards, organising operations and editing an electronics performance paper. She counts herself lucky to have been in the Control Room on the day the of first beams in 2008: “That was really exciting,” she remembers. “People had spent 15 or more years building the LHC, and the same kind of time scale on ATLAS. And this was the first time that those two things talked to each other.”

Kathy relocated to New York in September 2009, when her husband - known to everyone, even his parents, as Spoons - got a job designing programming languages for Google. Theirs is a long and geographically varied history, which began with them living across the hall from each other in undergrad dorms. A year of friendship with undercurrents followed, during which Kathy admits to having lit candles in her apartment for one of their maths homework sessions. “It was part of the joke!” she protests.

When they eventually became a couple they lived together in Ithaca and Berkeley, but following that they attended grad schools five hours' drive apart. “In the end it worked up well for us,” she considers. “We met before we had much life experience. Living in different places gave us a chance to have our own adventures, to each set up a life on our own, but still be together. It's also made us pretty resilient to being apart when we have to be.”

They got married just before Kathy moved to CERN, and Spoons spent 18 months with her in Geneva, writing up his thesis and riding his bike up and down every mountain he could find.

Back in New York, they live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, and love nothing more than cooking. “We really like food from all kinds of places. We have a large collection of cookbooks and I'm always going to different grocery stores to find interesting ingredients,” Kathy enthuses. Beginning a few months ago, she's now based at CERN 50 per cent of the time, living in the hostel for stretches of three weeks or so, meaning that opportunities for her to indulge this hobby here are limited: “I cook at other people's houses sometimes, but I want my stuff. I want my knife and my pans and my cookbooks and my spices, and so it's hard to do in the hostel.”

Her other hobbies too are generally more suited to either one place or the other. In New York she goes to concerts, events, watches friends play sports, and hangs out with a group of comedians she acted with back in college. In Geneva, she hikes, bikes and snowboards, as well as taking advantage of the location to see other places: Porto, Barcelona, Marrakech, Paris, and London, are just a handful of the cities she's visited.

Her main ATLAS responsibility right now is being the paper contact for the first exotics dilepton search; an organisational challenge that requires her to coordinate active contributors from all over the world. “Making sure that people who aren't at CERN 100 per cent of the time are also able to contribute to the analysis is something that I'm really interested in doing,” she says.

The nature of her role and her commuting means that emails are always rolling in at odd times of day and night relative to where she is, and she often misses out on occasions or adventures with friends in one location or the other. But on balance, she'd agree her position is pretty sweet:

“If there's something that Geneva doesn't have, New York has so much. But it doesn't have the beautiful countryside so close by. Instead of like other New Yorkers, leaving to the beach or upstate, I leave to go to Geneva!” she grins. “I have the best of both worlds.”

Elvar Karl Bjarkason

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:24:12 +0000

Elvar Karl Bjarkason

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 07/09/2010 - 17:24

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Elvar paragliding with a friend.

“I've always been interested in science, and questions about the universe and what makes it tick.” says Elvar Bjarkason. Like many physicists he began by being interested in general science, so still in primary school he liked mathematics, chemistry and physics, while learning about the structure of atoms. But that was just a start. Later, in his last three semesters at high school, he was much encouraged by three young and very enthusiastic teachers, teaching physics, astronomy/astrophysics and philosophy. “I liked the thought aspect in philosophy, as mentioned by Thomas Kuhn in the “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and in “The Scientific method” by Sir Karl Raimund Popper;” recalls Elvar. “I could very easily relate to them (my teachers) and they were in many ways a big factor in thinking I could have a future in physics,” he continues.

As he had good marks in all subjects, choosing which subject to study was still difficult. His Icelandic teacher suggested that he should study Icelandic literature. With both parents being geologists, geology would have been another option. Iceland's knowledge in geothermal energy is in high demand today and Elvar's father, working in geothermal exploration, travels to Indonesia, Turkey and New Mexico. Travelling as part of a career was a tempting prospect to Elvar as well, and so he wondered if perhaps geophysics was in his future.

Finally he made up his mind and started to study physics at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, where he has finished his second year of undergraduate study. “I found out about the summer student program when I saw it advertised by the student council for physics and math at my University.” Actually, he found out about it last year, but when he was in the process of applying for it, his professor suggested that he should wait another year and learn about quantum mechanics first, to really take benefit. Luckily he did, not just to follow the seminars at the CERN summer schools more easily, but also as this year the LHC is running and CERN is even more the place to be as a physicist...

Since Iceland is not a CERN member state, his summer-studentship is just 8 weeks long, with 6 weeks of lectures. “I do learn a lot, as most information is new to me. Most summer students have already finished their third year of undergraduate or have started their masters. Some seminars are too basic for me, but some are too advanced,” he explains and continues, “Next year I'm [going to take] more quantum mechanics, not just math.”

But he is not just learning a lot in the lectures. For his project, the offline display for histograms of ATLAS, he has to use ROOT, Python XML/HTML and Java. He learned these programming languages by using them. “I had a course in Matlab at the university and knowing one programming languages, it is easy to learn another one. I like the challenge of programming,” Elvar explains.

Unfortunately programming means a lot of desktop work - something that Elvar is not so fond of. “I like sports a lot - actually any sport with a racquet, like squash and tennis, Basketball and my favourite is floorball.” The game of floorball is also known by many other names, such as salibandy (in Finland), innebandy (in Sweden and Norway), and unihockey (in Switzerland and Germany). The game is believed to have originated in Gothenburg, Sweden, where it was played for fun as a pastime at schools. Floorball is played indoors with players, except for the goalkeeper, using a floorball stick that is short, (as compared with ice hockey), to get a plastic whiffle ball into a net past a goalkeeper “It is still a small sport in Iceland compared to Finland, Sweden or Norway” Elvar mentions and adds proudly, “The team I am playing on as winger is right now national champion and cup champion as well.”

Elvar's plans for the future are to finish his undergraduate studies in Iceland and then change to a Scandinavian university - maybe to Copenhagen, as he already knows Danish. It is still undecided, if it would be Astrophysics, Particle physics or Geophysics. Although the experience as summer student at CERN was meant to help him with his choice, he is still not totally sure. What he is definitely taking back home from Geneva and CERN is the experience of working in a big place dedicated to physics. “But for CERN being the high-end place of physics worldwide the environment and the building are rather odd,” he smiles. “Most of us summer students did expect a much more modern architecture. But obviously all the money goes into the experiment,” he adds with a grin and continues, “I appreciated a lot meeting other students from all over the world and discuss[ing] with them their plans for their further studies.” And he concludes: “I hope to keep in contact and have the opportunity to work together with some of them in the future.” And maybe come back to CERN as a fellow, once he finishes his studies.

Bengt Lund-Jensen

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Bengt Lund-Jensen

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 27/07/2010 - 02:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

ATLAS Collaboration

Bengt Lund-Jensen

“In Sweden you can go out dancing in the summertime, where they play popular music but adapted for dancing,” says Stockholm native Bengt Lund-Jensen. Nine years ago, he decided to re-visit the dances of his undergrad days in pursuit of fitness, and now he spends his summers stepping out with other Scandinavians in the midnight twilight.

“It's a kind of swing dance, but it's not done in more than Sweden, Finland, and Norway,” he explains. “Most swing dance is six or eight counts, but this is four counts to the basic step.”

Already a master of Boogie Woogie and Lindy Hop, two years ago Bengt added this new dance, Balboa, to his repertoire. “It's danced to the same music as Jitterbug,” he says of the fast dance, which originated in the crowded ballrooms of 1930s west coast America. “It was forgotten for a long time, but some people have been taking it up again and now there's a Balboa community all over the world.”

This dancing community that Bengt can count himself a part of is not trivial. After a reception at the recent ATLAS Week in Copenhagen, he wandered to a local park on the off-chance and ended up dancing the night away with familiar faces, a fact which, while staggering to an outsider, leaves him absolutely un-phased: “I expected that some would be there,” he smiles. “Though I recognised more dancers than I thought.”

Some of these, he knew from the Herräng summer dance camp, a five-week long party which attracts dancers from all over the world to a tiny Swedish village. This year, he made his third trip to the camp, meandering down the coast on his IF sailing boat, Spinaway, to spend a week dancing with 1000 others who simply can't sit still.

Boats, too, are a way of life for Bengt, who lives just outside the city of Stockholm, in the stunning archipelago. “I absolutely love it as a place,” he beams. “If I bike for five minutes, I can take a boat into central Stockholm to go to work.”

The boats run from April to Christmas – until the water freezes and becomes impassable, forcing people into their cars – and the same motley crew of ten or fifteen regulars can be found there each morning and evening. “We sit and chat. You can drink a coffee. And they have Internet on the boat, so working is a possibility. You can finish off work in the evening, send the last few emails on the way home.“ It was a chance encounter on the boat that eventually led to Bengt's 17-year-old son, Malcolm, taking up the bagpipes six years ago.

The trade-off for these lovely social summers, of course, is the Scandinavian winters: “the worst time of the year”. The sun shows its face reluctantly between the hours of 9:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m. but once the snow falls in December, things start to turn magical. “Without any snow, it's dark, just plain dark. But with the snow,” Bengt considers, slowly, contemplatively, “it's… different. The tiny bit of light there is reflects back.”

Bengt's life is and always has been blissfully Stockholm-centric, but he tries hard to “jigsaw” family life, working in the tiny ATLAS group at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and visits to CERN for meetings, discussions, and to fulfil his shift-duty to his detector.

“I spent a lot of my scientific life building this fantastic detector, and now we really need to make the very best of the data that we can,” he explains. “It's not just about doing your own analysis. That's the collaborative spirit.”

He has been involved with ATLAS since the very beginning, joining to work on preparations for LHC experiments as a post-doc with the Royal Institute of Technology in 1989, following a stint at CERN as an Uppsala University engineering physics PhD student from 1980 to 1985. Here, he fell in love with the place, the attitude of the people, the international style, and the scientific possibilities.

“It's a fantastic place for a PhD student to be,” he says. “There're so many people, a lot of scientific knowledge, and most are willing to give PhD students part of their time answering questions.”

On the subject of the 20-year LHC journey, he laughs: “If someone had told me in 1989 that we'd get data in 2010, I might have done something else in the meantime! But I think we learned a lot along the way about making a large experiment. And it was a very, very nice feeling to know that, after all these years, we've got data.”

Up until this point in his career, Bengt has been solely involved in detector design, preparation, construction, and testing (contributing to the ATLAS barrel presampler and optical read-out fibres for the Liquid Argon calorimeter). For the first time now, his attentions are turning to physics analysis. His eye is on Supersymmetry, and what it might tell us about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but his mind is open.

“We don't know what nature is like for us. We're having to find out. I believe we'll find something, but what this something is, I don't know.”

In the meanwhile, expect Bengt to continue dancing to his own beat.

Pascal Pralavorio

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Pascal Pralavorio

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 13/07/2010 - 02:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Sarah McGovern

Pascal in the Building 40 cafeteria, in front of the ATLAS model

Pascal in the Building 40 cafeteria, in front of the ATLAS model.

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Pascal seems to have a trend flowing through his life: to strategise and plan, to accept the consequences of discovery, and to enjoy the ride. For him, to explore is everything. With such varied interests as physics, singing, and playing guitar, piano, and games of strategy, it is apparent that he has a love for the thinking process. Pascal enjoys what he encounters unexpectedly, and especially what stems from the toughest parts of problematic situations.

“For me, the real pleasure is when you solve a problem, or solve a difficulty, even in your life, and you see that it's difficult. If you feel the difficulty, and you overcome this difficulty, then you are really feeling a part of you, and have a lot of pleasure because of it.”

Coming from the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille (IN2P3), Pascal took part in the construction, testing, and commissioning of the ATLAS Electromagnetic Calorimeter. He worked for many years preparing it to perform as expected. It was very difficult for him when, in September 2008, the LHC suddenly failed. He could have gone away from ATLAS at that point, realising that he had already learned a great deal, but decided to wait for a second chance to get this extraordinary machine running. He is very glad he did. Experience has taught him not to anticipate success, but to expect, with proper preparation, to encounter the unforeseeable with joy. To him, this makes the whole journey worthwhile.

Along these lines, his insights are clearly valuable. “If you have something you really want, and you do all the things in this direction, you always get some prize. Not always the one you will expect, or the one you have searched for, but you always get something.” He added, “In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much.”

At present, Pascal is engaged in helping rediscover the Z and W bosons. “It is a major milestone for the ATLAS detector since these particles were discovered at CERN almost 30 years ago. This is the first step before any new discovery can be claimed!”

He is part of the team which ensures that the calorimeter is working as expected. More precisely, thanks to the work he has pursued with his colleague, Fabrice Hubaut, they managed to detect subtle changes in the material located in front of the calorimeter, as reported in a recent issue of ATLAS e-News. Pascal is deeply involved in understanding how to best detect particles that deposit no energy in the calorimeter. He does this through inferring their presence by means of tracking missing energy. This work means a great deal to him, and this research and data analysis are absolutely central in his life.

Pascal also has a love of games. Igisoro and Go are two of his favorites, both of which satisfy his penchant for strategy. Igisoro is a two-player game, part of the mancala family, and a variant played primarily in central Africa. Go is from China and is an abstract strategy game involving the capture of your opponents stones, as well as the creation of territories.

Pascal is the father of two girls, Lisa and Noemie, and he is married to Corinne Pralavorio, who works at CERN in the communication group. Of all of his family's activities, walking in nature and singing together are his favorites. All four of them sing, and it seems that his heart likely soars a bit when he gets to sing with his girls.

Though he clearly loves to sing, Pascal also plays the guitar and piano, and has a group of musical friends near his home in Farges, France, with whom he sometimes plays. Together they try to emulate music by artists such as Bob Dylan. To Pascal, Dylan represents something special in music, mainly because of Dylan's ability to animate language with music. “It's a melting between the words and the music and how you phrase it, and how you enhance it somehow. It's like when you put spice on your food; it completely changes your feeling. So, even if I'm not a native English [speaker] I can really feel what [Dylan's] expressing, and this is really amazing.“

Trevor Vickey

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Trevor Vickey

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 14/06/2010 - 02:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Trevor Vickey

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

“I thought South Africa would be a cool place to live,” he smiles. “And I liked that there was a lot of young blood in the department, people were very friendly, and there have been some very good students there, like Stanley Mandelstam and Saul Teukolsky.”

Trevor is hoping to be instrumental in bringing about change at his new institute, and the first step – getting Wits officially onto ATLAS as part of a South African cluster with the University of Johannesburg – is already in progress. He started his new job in January, and in February, he co-wrote the cluster's formal Expression of Interest letter to join ATLAS. The Collaboration is due to vote on whether to accept South Africa at ATLAS Week in Copenhagen later this month.

On the ground, when he moves to Johannesburg in early July, he expects to be doing a lot of intensive one-on-one work with disadvantaged students who aren't quite prepared for calculus-based physics courses.

“I think that you can really change some of the students' lives,” he says. “It's pretty obvious, the gap between the rich and the poor. You fly in and you see people living in these tin shacks and then you see people driving Ferraris around. It's still a developing country, so even on the campus you can make changes very fast. Anything that you do, you will see have an impact.”

The move also brings he and his wife Oana together on the same experiment for the first time, although they are already responsible for what he terms “the first combined result from ATLAS and CMS” – their son, Alex, now aged two.

Before their five-year postdoc stints at CERN, he and Oana – who met at the SLAC Summer Institute in 2001 – were based on CDF and OPAL respectively during their PhDs. He was studying in his home state of Illinois (at the University of Illinois), and she was studying in Freiburg, until she moved to Chicago for experimental work on D0. When he found out that there were some retirements coming up in his new department at Wits, Trevor says, in classic physicist speak, “I saw a possibility of solving this complicated two-body problem.”

His excitement at this new horizon is evident, and not just from an academic point of view. “We’ve talked about going from Johannesburg, up the coast of Africa to Egypt. I like to go camping, hiking, mountaineering, that sort of thing. It'd be great to go to Madagascar, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique … and I'm looking forward to going to the National Parks.”

One of the first of those visits will take place in December, when he is s co-organising the “Discovery Physics at the LHC” workshop on the border of Kruger National Park. “It's one of the largest in the world actually,” he grins, “it's like the size of Israel.”

At ATLAS, Trevor busies himself with the SCT and Higgs searches.“Mostly stuff to taus,” he ponders. “Anything to taus!” Originally he focussed on Standard Model Higgs to tau-tau, but with the expected lower centre-of-mass energy and smaller datasets for the next couple of years, he has begun looking further afield to more exotic models.

“Now I think that my research will focus on alternate theories – like those where you have five Higgses and the decay mode to taus could be enhanced over the Standard Model”

While South Africa is not (yet) a part of the ATLAS Collaboration, Trevor is affiliated with Oxford University, where he holds a Visiting Lecturer position. Hopefully, the ATLAS week will bring good news for him and his South African colleagues, and the new phase of his life will begin.

But he doesn't intend to stray from Geneva for too long. He and Oana will keep hold of their house in France, and he plans to be back for ATLAS Weeks and shifter duties, as well as routinely spending the whole of the Southern Hemisphere summer (December to February) at CERN.

“I can shift my teaching duties around too,” he smiles. “so I think that with this early data-taking period, I'll definitely try to be here quite a bit.”

Mahsana Ahsan

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:30:42 +0000

Mahsana Ahsan

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 31/05/2010 - 17:30

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Mahsana and her husband Haleem by Lake Geneva.

For most particle physicists, memories of the dim and distant past when they couldn't yet use a computer are distinctly fuzzy. For Mahsana Ahsan, though, they're a little fresher: “I didn't have a chance to use computers during my studies due to lack of computer labs,” she explains. “When I first went to the US, I was only able to type an email very slowly.”

In an Internet café in her hometown of Lahore, she carefully put together her electronic PhD application to Kansas State University, picking up technical tips from café staff.

Once she arrived in Kansas, in 2002, she was thrown in at the deep end, straight away having to submit an analysis proposal to the grad school, with an example analysis. Although she quickly became comfortable with Linux commands and programming languages, she still notices the disadvantages of not having the technical knowledge base those around her do.

“I feel sometimes this is a little bit of an obstacle in learning and progressing well, in doing things efficiently,” she says. “But with these great collaborations like ATLAS, where people work together, you learn things from other people.”

She may not have known how to use a computer eight years ago, but today Mahsana is responsible for developing a tool used at the Pixel desk in the Control Room. It visualises the whole Pixel system - all 1744 modules - in one data quality display, so that shifters can get an easy overview of what's going on in the detector, and spot which modules might be having trouble taking good data.

When she got to the end of her physics Masters at Punjab University, Lahore, Mahsana hadn’t even considered a PhD as an option for her. It was thanks to the encouragement of one particular tutor that she plucked up the courage to apply for further independent study abroad.

She credits that same tutor, Professor Mujahid Kamran, for being the first to pique her interest in particle physics too. “In my first year, I was studying quantum mechanics with him, and I was very impressed with the way he used to throw questions in the class. He kept us very active.”

In her second year particle physics class, Professor Kamran gave Mahsana a book of problems, and told her that once she could work them all out on her own, she would really know the subject. Sure enough, she had managed it by the end of the year.

Professor Kamran has been instrumental in encouraging young Pakistani women to pursue physics. “I’m very pleased that, after seven or eight years of his efforts, we are seeing some female grad students, post docs, and even one assistant professor,” says Mahsana.

Moving to the US to work on D0 with Kansas State didn‘t only offer academic opportunities that other Pakistani women might have missed out on. “I learned driving there, for the very first time. And I even learned biking [cycling] for the first time!” Mahsana laughs, a little bashfully.“In Pakistan when I was growing up, it was very uncommon for girls to do biking on the street.”

“The US was a completely new world [for me] coming from Pakistan, which is still considered a developing country.” Nowadays, she says, children of both genders are given much more freedom, and girls can even study late in libraries, where before it was unsafe to travel home alone after dark. “The problems are still there, but things are developing.”

Mahsana describes Geneva as “just like a paradise” where she enjoys spending time down by the lake, browsing the shops, walking from place to place near her home in Saint-Genis, and sampling the local cuisine: “It‘s really like a nutritious food, especially compared to the US!”

She began her post-doc here in July 2008, with the University of Texas at Dallas. Beaming, she explains that her husband of six months has just arrived in Geneva to join her, after they have spent over a year mostly apart while he studied in Karachi.

Right now, Mahsana is developing her analysis code, ready to begin a search for dark matter once ATLAS has collected enough data.

“There are lots of dark matter theories, but [the one I'm working on] just appeared in 2008,” she explains. “I basically wanted to do some search. Because the LHC itself is a very new experiment, I want to discover something that has never been discovered!”

Lucie de Nooij

Steven Goldfarb — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:35:33 +0000

Lucie de Nooij

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Wed, 12/05/2010 - 17:35

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Lucie with her horse, Prince

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

“I can say and do stuff that other people would think, ‘ooh!’,” she describes, wincing,“and then end it with a laugh, and everybody will laugh,”Although people joke that one day she&‘ll put her foot in it with someone important, Lucie‘s no-fear approach to life has so far served her well.

“I‘m not really the kind of physicist who always wanted to do physics,” she admits. Indeed, her best subject in school was Ancient Greek. By the time she finished high school though the idea had caught hold.

At Amsterdam University, she enrolled in a ‘Beta-Gamma’ degree programme – the Beta part covering physics and mathematics, and the Gamma part in economics, sociology and psychology. After one year, she whittled her focus down to pure physics, with economics as a minor.

When it came to choosing her Masters subject, the economist in her decided it would be more economical to choose physics, as just a further six months on the end of that would earn her an economics Masters too. But things didn’t pan out that way; Lucie‘s confidence had landed her a job as a headhunter while she was at university and, four months before she was due to graduate, one of the companies she‘d met through that, Shell, wanted her for themselves:

“I didn‘t really want to decide just yet on whether I was going to do a PhD or maybe travel abroad, but Shell offered me a really nice salary, and said ’we need you to tell us what you’ll do, by the end of next week.’”

The idea of a PhD appealed because it represented another four years of being expected to seek answers to questions; of no-one being upset if she didn’t have the answers yet.

“I ended up with two offers, one from Shell, to drill for gas in the north of the Netherlands, and one from Amsterdam University, for four years with one year at CERN. The choice didn't seem too hard to me,” she smiles.

Like most PhD students, Lucie’s time is split between service work, hers on the SCT, taking shifts and contributing to programs used in the Control Room, and analysis. “It‘s not too bad to have two things in hand,” she considers. “I know most people hate that, but if I get stuck with one, I‘ll go and work a little bit on the other for a while. That actually works for me.”

Her analysis involves finding resonances of known particles, an area which some consider unglamorous and even pointless, since they are well known from previous experiments. “I find it interesting because you can use real data right from the beginning,” she reasons. “People are trying to use these resonances to actually extract background values for later, maybe they‘ll even be used in a Higgs analysis, or top quark.”

After starting her PhD in April 2009, Lucie arrived at CERN in January this year. Proving the old adage that positive things happen to positive people, her long-term boyfriend managed to find a job in Geneva, starting on the exact same date as her stint here. In two car journeys, they moved their mattress, stereo, and clothes to Geneva Old Town from their house in Amsterdam.

The break from the “constant” rain of the Netherlands is a welcome change for Lucie, but she has found Swiss people to be of less sunny disposition: “The Dutch are very spontaneous. To the point where they‘ll get involved with strangers on the street,” she explains. “This is considered nice to say, for example, ‘oh, your shoelace is off, be careful you don’t fall‘!”

By comparison, she finds the Swiss rather distant. “If you get into the tram, nobody smiles at you. Everybody looks the other way! I thought it was extremely rude, but it's not, it‘s just formal. I really had to get used to that.”

One area where Switzerland is definitely scoring points with seasoned skier Lucie, though, is the mountains. From age eight, she holidayed in Grechen (CH) each year with her parents, and would go out racing with a local Swiss girl and her father. “I still like to have the big slopes and just go” she grins.

She spent several months teaching skiing in Austria right before starting her PhD, and made the most of every Saturday and Sunday in Switzerland this winter, but with the end of the season, she‘s looking for something new. “Now the skiing is really over, I need a horse,” she says, in the absence of Prince, the horse she shares with a friend back in Amsterdam.

Another thing she‘s had to leave behind, for now, is her involvement with political party, the Democrats: “I used to go to a discussion every now and then. The Democrats have many people with different studies, and I like the idea that you have that kind of expertise discussing where the Netherlands should go.”

She hasn‘t let go her political leanings altogether though, and was pleased to take part in the recent Women‘s Day celebrations, following a radio interview where a male presenter had asserted that physics wasn‘t sexy and then asked her what she was wearing.

“Later on I thought, ‘It‘s none of his business!’ And he would have never asked that to a guy. I didn‘t like the notion that I needed to be sexy in any way in order to do my job,” she explains. “So I liked the idea of doing something positive for women‘s day. Many of these feminist events tend to have a complaining air, but this was actually showing that things are going well, and I liked that.”

Nitesh Soni

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:44:36 +0000

Nitesh Soni

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 27/04/2010 - 17:44

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Nitesh Soni on Columbia icefields, Canada.

Although he was a self-professed ‘bookworm’ up until his PhD days at Panjab University, Nitesh Soni somehow never expected to become a research scientist. “I was actually preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exam,” he recalls, an essential step on the path to becoming a Police Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. “So I just joined particle physics research for a second option. But then after four months, my supervisor sent me to Japan, which changed my life.”

Up until that point, friends and relatives had been encouraging Nitesh to pursue an administrative career, and he hadn’t had an opportunity to think outside of that particular box.

“When I was in KEK, you know, the Japanese are very hard working… they were really dedicated to these experiments, and somehow I got the same feeling. So that was my turning point,” he smiles.

It was also his culinary turning point. Japanese restaurants had little to offer vegetarians, and tempura started to get tiresome, so Nitesh would club together with other Indian friends, to socialise and prepare meals that reminded them of home.

He spent a total of 2.5 years stationed in Japan – over 80 per cent of his PhD – in stretches of six to eight months at a time. When that came to an end, he swapped Belle for Babar, experiments which are “pretty much in competition with each other, in terms of B-physics”.

“I wanted to get more exposure,” he considers. “When you’re a PhD student, you do a lot of things because someone says do something. But when you’re doing a postdoc, you become more confident when you handle your projects independently.” This time, he was mainly based at his new institute – the University of Birmingham – but he made short visits to SLAC to take shifts on the experiment and attend collaboration meetings.

It was during this first postdoc, in November 2006, that he married his now wife, Shalini. The two had met on one of Nitesh’s trips home to India during his PhD. “My parents actually went to my wife’s family home and proposed the marriage,” he explains, although this was not a traditional arranged marriage: “Well, they felt ‘ok, these kids are interested’ and that’s it.”

For his next postdoc, Nitesh changed country and changed direction – moving to the University of Alberta in Canada in October 2008, to work on hadronic physics with ATLAS. “I thought it was a good time to make a transition, because the next decade will be dominated by LHC physics,” he explains of the subject-shift. As for the location, he was looking for an English-speaking base country to allow Shalini to make use of her training as a chemistry teacher.

“Our first winter was very hard there,” he remembers. Growing up in Hamirpur, a small town in Himachal Pradesh state, northern India, with a typical temperature range of 0°C to 40°C had not prepared him for the -40°C Edmonton winter. “It was a horrible, horrible experience!” he laughs in hindsight.

But it isn’t all bad; in the summer, they discovered the Rocky mountains: “That is a wonderful place. If you would ask me, I would tell you that it is a Heaven on Earth.”

In spite of this, Nitesh is adamant that hiking is not for him. Instead, he prefers to watch cricket and comedy films, to travel to new places, and to dine out with his family: ”Mostly we like Italian food and the traditional English breakfast. It’s very interesting for us somehow!”

The family has grown recently, with the arrival of new son Shanit on December 14th. His name is a combination of those of his parents, an invention of Nitesh’s which a Google search later revealed to mean ‘marvellous’. “The baby is keeping us busy all the time.” he smiles.

At work, most of his time is being absorbed by his software project: the Beam Separation Scan Package. He is creating an interface between the various luminosity detectors and the LHC during beam scanning periods, the results of which will be useful for making absolute luminosity measurements in the initial stages of data-taking.

When he’s not doing that, Nitesh is looking at Standard Model physics: “My interest is to measure the double ratio of W + n jets to Z + n jets, where n is zero to six,” he explains. “For now, it’s still in the preliminary stage and it will take time to mature.”

Indeed, he expects it will take seven or eight months before he starts seeing results from this analysis, by which time he hopes he and his family will be stationed at CERN. Ultimately though, after so much moving, India is calling Nitesh home.

“I’m really working very hard on my various things, but I’ve already gained enough experience now. Probably I’m ready to go back to India,” he considers. “My dream is to lead research from the front in India. My target to go back is 2011, but it could happen at any time…”

Rachid Mazini

Steven Goldfarb — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Rachid Mazini

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Tue, 13/04/2010 - 02:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Kate McAlpine

Rachid Mazini, mountaineering

Rachid Mazini, mountaineering.

Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.

“Once I was there I started getting more interested in mountain activities like hiking,” says Rachid. These activities have since multiplied, and he now enjoys mountaineering, skiing, and snowshoeing as well.

He spent the early years of his college education at the Université Cadi Ayyad, which he describes as more fun than the following years when he began participating in experiments through the Strasbourg Centre for Nuclear Research. “You know the first years of undergrad. Basically one studies, but also one discovers different kinds of things, of life and freedom,” he says.

Even though the language was the same in Strasbourg and Marrakech, he experienced a bit of culture shock, navigating a new education system and being away from family and friends. “One really needs to keep trying and not get discouraged by the change, because it’s really a radical change,” he recalls.

But he could always count on the support of his parents, and their encouragement to keep pursuing his studies. And he did, participating in the design and construction of particle detectors and physics analysis for the fixed target experiments NA38 and NA51 following his Master’s studies. And when an opportunity arose that would bring him further afield, to Canada, Rachid was ready to take the chance.

“I went there because I met Professor Pierre Depommier,” says Rachid. “He was one of the very first high energy physicists at CERN.” Pierre Depommier had indicated that Rachid would be welcome, and Rachid decided that he would join the Université de Montréal and ATLAS. “I knew some people there and it was easy to integrate,” he says.

His second PhD supervisor, Georges Azuelos, set Rachid’s gold standard for good teaching. He worked alongside his students, encouraging collaborative discussions of any roadblocks. Trying to live up to that example, Rachid strives to create an open culture within his group and to be an approachable supervisor so that any problems can be solved through teamwork. “It’s very important not to have strong hierarchy between different people,” he says.

With a move to Toronto in 2003, Rachid began to split his time between ATLAS and Fermilab’s CDF experiment. Working on a running experiment, he gained experience dealing with real data taking and analysis while he helped prepare for physics at the Tevatron’s successor.

He spent some time at Fermilab, but for Rachid, the flat landscape of the upper Midwestern United States doesn’t hold a candle to the peaks not far from Geneva. “This is what I love about CERN – the location is fantastic,” he says.

In addition to his other mountain activities, Rachid started rock climbing in Montreal and has continued such expeditions over the past decade. “I tried every possible climbing technique and style,” he says. He climbs with friends, both for safety and because they are part of the fun, as he explains: “It’s not just the climbing part, it’s spending the whole day with somebody so there’s lots of exchange and discussions.”

Last year, Rachid also began taking advantage of Lac Léman as well as the Alps and Jura – he joins voyages with CERN’s sailing club. He can sail smaller boats on his own, but he has yet to learn the ropes of the larger crafts.

Rachid met his future wife at a conference in Puerto Rico, in 2006. She’s a CMS physicist who shares his enjoyment of the mountains, and she is the reason for his most recent change in affiliation to Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, stationed at CERN.

He enjoys the open atmosphere of his new group, the motivation of the students, and the diversity of projects available. He’s currently looking into missing transverse momentum in the Inner Detector and tau-related physics. One of his areas of interest is the Higgs decay to two taus, but he notes: “We need more luminosity and higher energy for these detections, so at the beginning we will just look at Standard Model physics such as W and Z decaying to taus.”

Like many others at CERN, he was watching the ATLAS event displays on March 30th, and he was impressed with the detector performance, revealing photons and jets clearly from the start. “To see that the detector was working, and the infrastructure was working,” says Rachid, “that was actually really nice, that it happened this way from day one.”

And watch this space for his upcoming article on missing transverse momentum.

Jean-Baptiste Blanchard

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:49:19 +0000

Jean-Baptiste Blanchard

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 29/03/2010 - 17:49

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Kate McAlpine

JB and Eve

If you call Jean-Baptiste Blanchard by his full first name, try it the French way and drop the ‘p’. But he generally goes by JB.

JB has been a musician since he was just seven years old. “My parents wanted me to play piano, and I also wanted to play something else,” says JB. He would have chosen the bagpipes, but without a teacher available, he settled for the trumpet. “Just because it was loud and shiny,” he recalls.

But didn’t follow in his eldest brother’s footsteps, who became a musician – JB gave up music for sports in his last years of high school, participating in handball, judo, and swimming. Perhaps influenced by his parents, both elementary school teachers, his plan was to become a physics teacher by the time he graduated.

He stuck with this plan through the early years of his Bachelor’s degree until what he calls “a twist of fate”. His first research placement was at Orsay’s Linear Accelerator Laboratory, and it changed his mind. “Particle physics is something I had always liked, but was kind of strange and far, and after doing the internship it became concrete.” He was studying backgrounds in NEMO-3, located at the French-Italian border, an experiment to find out whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

The next spring, he took another internship with NEMO-3, and in the summer, he found his way to CERN as a student researcher on LHCb. As much as he enjoyed the physics, he enjoyed the proximity of the mountains at least as much. “This is a good reason to go to CERN,” he remarks. He and the other students hiked on the Salève and Jura.

JB’s family likes to take more serious hiking holidays, however, travelling into the Alps, Central Massif, and Pyrennées once a year. Lately, they’ve been going further afield, such as Norway. “It was always hiking on mountains between two fjords,” he says of the treks near Bergen. “That’s what’s really impressive about the fjord region. It’s really beautiful because it’s mixed up between mountains and ocean, and it’s really green because it’s pouring rain.”

His family is of hardy stock: they were rained on, but not rained out. Luckily, they had a car they could retreat to as well.

JB isn’t a major fan of big cities. He comes from Jargeau, population 4000, not far from Orléans. “It’s just near the Loire,” he says. As a child, he enjoyed the freedom of biking through the town and in the nearby forests.

Acclimatised to small-town living, he prefers Orsay to nearby Paris, which is also convenient as he completes his PhD with LAL Orsay. “It’s more like the way I was used to live. At least here, they’ve got forest,” he says.

But apart from holidays, JB finds time to walk through forests hard to come by. “The problem is my girlfriend is also working in ATLAS as a PhD student, so we are kind of always speaking about work, thinking about work…” Both he and his girlfriend, Eve Le Menedeu, are student lecturers. JB reckons that half of what would be spare time is taken up with lecture preparation and correction of assignments.

He considers the rest of his activities fairly pedestrian: enjoying restaurants, cinemas, museums, and concerts. But as a member of Afreubo, a student run orchestra, he also plays in concerts. He picked up the trumpet again, after a decade break, to join last year. “They’re kind of strange,” he notes. “The rule is to play with the most awful hat you’ve got.” Eve introduced him to the group, a flute player herself.

The two of them also like to hike together, and JB plans on bringing his boots to CERN when he visits this summer. He can do most of his work on the W mass, the software package for W decays, and Liquid Argon temperature analysis from Orsay. But every two months or so, he comes to CERN for ATLAS Weeks, Liquid Argon weeks, or just to meet up with people on the same projects. Before long, he’ll have shifts to take as well.

And even if he finds he’s too busy to visit the mountains around CERN, his family is thinking of a visit to the Scottish highlands this summer…

Jim Degenhardt

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:57:49 +0000

Jim Degenhardt

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 08/03/2010 - 17:57

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Jim Degenhardt relaxes during a hike.

As he munches on an all-American breakfast – fresh juice and a bagel hand-delivered by a friend from New York – Jim Degenhardt is the first to admit he’s not a morning person. It’s the aftermath of the 9 a.m. Run Meeting, a daily appointment for Jim as co-run coordinator of the TRT, but the NY-themed sustenance seems to be doing the trick.

Jim actually hails from Plymouth, near Detroit, Michigan, where he says he grew up living “your basic suburban lifestyle”. After starting out as a chemistry student at the University of Michigan, he changed to physics soon after meeting organic chemistry. “Organic chemistry and me did not mix well,” he summarises with characteristic deadpan.

His introduction to ATLAS came during the third year of his undergrad, when a contact at his college put him to work assembling Monitored Drift Tubes (MDTs) that detect muons in the ATLAS detector. Two years later, after completing a “victory lap” fifth year at college (just in case he decided to become a teacher at some point) and gaining an Honours degree in Physics, he found himself at CERN for summer 2002. He spent his time pressure-testing the shipped MDTs, to find and fix leaks, and deciding whether or not he should go on to grad school. In the end, he “took the fearless attitude” and went for a PhD on D0 at Fermilab, Chicago, before returning to ATLAS as a postdoc in 2007.

Although Michigan is a famously flat state, Jim still managed to learn to ski there, at a station named Mount Brighton. “It’s basically a 300 foot hill built on a giant heap of trash,” he informs. The skills came in handy when he moved in close range of the Alps, and he has spent the last two seasons perfecting his downhill, before attempting some randonnée skiing. “My stamina has waned some this year, probably because I’ve been spending quite a bit more time in the Control Room lately,” he concedes. “For now, I know my limits.”

Aside from a little mountaineering, most of his other leisure activities are as all-American as his breakfasts. Being Vice President of the CERN Softball Club requires him to do “very little” other than attend practices out on the Higgs Field (oh yes!) near the Prévessin site. Games against other local teams take place at the US Marine barracks at Bellevue, where the taste of home is authenticated with American beer, hotdogs and hamburgers.

Jim is also a keen bowler, and played in the Fermilab league with his team, the Sexy Beasts. Unfortunately his bowling ball and stand-out blue flame shoes did not make it to Europe with him, but his ‘I’m a Sexy Beast’ team T-Shirt did, and could make an appearance in the ATLAS Control Room at any time…

Fun stories from the Control Room are a bit of a speciality for Jim, who, aside from being one of the new crop of ATLAS Bloggers, was also Shift Leader for the very first collisions ever seen by the ATLAS detector. He landed the coveted spot through a combination of “careful planning and tea leaf reading”, booking his shifts a couple of months in advance and hoping to luck out on the timing.

His assessment of the day: “Mmm, it was a little exciting,” indicates exactly why he is a good person to have at the helm during high-pressure moments – level-headed and seemingly unflappable. “Yeah, for the most part I’m pretty laid back,” he agrees, with apparently huge understatement. So what gets under his skin?

Well, that would be his brother. His identical twin brother. Jim prides himself on his poker face, but his twin Jeff, with whom he has “a love hate relationship”, can not only read him, but can complete his sentences. “He’s more boisterous. We don’t think the same, but I understand how he thinks.” As young children, they were occasionally allied in plots against their older sister, but these unifications were short lived. “We’re the antithesis of each other!” he laughs.

What gets under his skin in a more positive way is physics analyses: “Ultimately the cool stuff is looking for interesting little things that no-one’s ever seen or thought about before.” Being TRT co-run coordinator is dominating his time right now, but he recalls getting pretty excited over his PhD WZ diboson analysis. “I think it was the first time it had been seen at a hadron collider – which was the smallest cross section at the time – and the diboson processes were just starting to be found,” he enthuses, briefly. The characteristic cool is never far away though: “Well. It’s an old bag now.”

Jim may like to keep his face straight, his cards close to his chest and to give little away, but his sense of fun isn’t far from the surface and he may just surprise you. “Last time I went to the US, I got Heelys,” he grins, referring to the shoes with rollers on the heels that under-12s go crazy for. “I’m still practicing… they’re a little bit trickier than you think. Next time I’m in the Control Room, maybe I’ll go roll around...” You have been warned.

Rolf Seuster

Steven Goldfarb — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Rolf Seuster

Top HIghlight

False

Steven Goldfarb Mon, 22/02/2010 - 01:00

Highlight

False

ATLAS Profile from the e-News Archives

Kate McAlpine