What is it like to work at the Large Hadron Collider?

Amita Raval, particle physicist

Known worldwide by its French acronym, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, is the Vatican of particle physics - only true seekers need apply. Luckily for me, I am deemed one of them.

What we seek at CERN are the building blocks of the universe and the accompanying manual that nature uses to assemble them. We do this with the help of a highly complex machine made up of one particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider - and six detectors, all found 100 metres below the surface of the Earth. The accelerator collides beams of protons travelling at close to the speed of light. The detectors, some the size of cathedrals, capture these collisions at a mind-numbingly fast rate. Think of a 100-megapixel camera taking 40 million frames every second.

We create these collisions for two reasons. First, the best way to study what something is made of is to break it up and examine the debris. Additionally, it is also possible to create new particles by smashing the beams together.

I am one of more than 3000 physicists and engineers working on the CMS experiment, one of the six detectors. A typical workday on CMS involves a myriad of different activities, including searching for signs of the Higgs boson or other new particles, writing up what we find in journal papers, attending meetings, developing new software and thinking of machine upgrades. Multitasking is essential!

Since it costs so much to build machines like the LHC, no country can do it by itself. The CMS experiment alone includes people from 183 institutes in 38 countries. This means I get to work with people from all over the world and travel to far-flung places.

What impresses me is how people from diverse backgrounds and work ethics come together to work in (mostly) healthy competition and collaboration towards a common goal. They are not motivated by money but by the quest for knowledge. Noble, but it's not all champagne and roses, of course. The day-to-day coordination of these collaborations, which are run democratically, is not a trivial matter. Everyone has their own opinions on just about everything so at times it can be difficult to reach a consensus. Although we always manage to, sometimes getting everyone on board requires United Nations-style negotiations and diplomacy.

I arrived at the world's most exciting particle physics laboratory via a rather convoluted route. My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I subsequently enjoyed working as an engineer but something was missing. It didn't evoke the same sense of awe I had experienced while studying the physics required for my degree, so I went back to university to do a master's in neutrino physics. This was followed by a PhD in particle physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. I came to CERN to work on the CMS experiment two years ago and soon, I will be off to Princeton University to teach physics and continue research on CMS.

CERN is an incredibly exciting place to work. To get here you need a solid scientific background, lots of hard work and discipline. You need to be prepared to work long days and, very often, nights. But even this is not enough. To get to a place like CERN, the single most essential requirement is a fundamental curiosity about nature and a continuous desire to learn. But once you get here, you will find your education has only just begun.

Amita will continue blogging for Big Wide World over the coming months

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1994a218/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cbigwideworld0C20A110C10A0Cwhat0Eis0Eit0Elike0Eto0Ework0Eat0Ethe0Elarge0Ehadron0Ecollider0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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