The beginning: Training week

Hello!
I am writing to you from George Mason, but soon I will be on a plane headed to Geneva! This week was dubbed "training week" as we prepare for our journey. I will be working for my professor on his project called NA62. (I'll get into that more later.) Another student from Mason and my roommate at CERN, Tina, is also working on NA62 but she will be doing much more advanced research than I will. There are also four other students from around the northern VA area that my professor hired. The six of us are grouped together based on location and the grants that my professor is given, but we won't be working on the same projects.

For those of you that might be wondering, CERN is the largest particle research laboratory in the world.  The most famous accelerator at CERN is of course the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world's largest and highest-energy accelerator. Its most famous research concerns the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that plays an important part of our current theories (you can read a story about it here.) There are many accelerators hooked up to the LHC at CERN, as you can see in the picture below. All have very specific and exciting research projects that are confirming and changing our current research theories with every experiment!

I'll be working in the central part of the picture that says "North Area." (An interesting thing to note is that half of CERN is in France and half of it is in Switzerland. I'll be living in my dorm in Switzerland, but working in France.) The project that I'll be joining, NA62, is designed to use the Super Photon Synchrotron to study rare kaon decays. For example, when a kaon particle decays into a pion, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. The goal is to record this rare event 100 times in a two year period. 2013 is the final simulation period before actual results are recorded next year. This research is a collaboration of scientists from around the world and I am very lucky to be joining them (even if I'll just be doing the menial programming tasks!)

This week at Mason is a time for us to learn more about the facility and our projects at CERN, as well as the material we should be familiar with before starting our projects. I have been spending my training time learning C++, a programming language that I will use at CERN, and Linux, a computer system on which the computers at CERN operate. The preparation I'm doing now will hopefully prevent me from being too confused when I start my project!

I think I am most excited for the people I am going to meet and the places I will see. I'll be living in a dorm with about 300 interns from around the world...think of the different cultures and great minds all in one place! I'll be hearing lectures from the world's greatest scientists. I'll be seeing Nobel Prize laureates in the cafeteria! And even more, I'll be able to travel all around Europe! Castles in Switzerland... beaches in Italy... the Eiffel Tower in Paris... here I come!

CERN's Wikipedia entry lists its major scientific achievements in particle physics. It shows that a new breakthrough has been discovered for the past three years in a row... I wonder what discovery will happen this summer?