🚨Job Opportunity reminder! 

Are you a physicist working on the @ATLASexperiment, and would you like to work at CERN for 6 months?

Two grants, work with me @CERN on software projects:

1. Interactive Event Data Visualization 📸

2. Physics Validation 📊

Deadline is TOMORROW! 😱

1. 📸 Interactive Event Data Visualization (a.k.a., "Event Displays")

You will work with me on one or two software projects to help develop and maintain the ATLAS software tools to interactively visualize data from the collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator

2. 📊 Physics Validation

You will help design and develop the core software components of a new framework for the Physics Validation

That means thoroughly investigating distributions and trends in data to certify that the physics results we produce are correct

Interested? 😉

Or, do you know somebody who works in the @ATLASexperiment and might be interested?

You can find all the info here (ATLAS internal link only; sorry for the others...): 

https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/AtlasProtected/OfflineActivityCoordinationBoard/Software-Development-Grant-Proposals-2025.pdf 

And let me know if you have any questions! 🤗

Good luck with your application, and... hopefully, see you at CERN! 👍🤞

#cern #jobs #grant

6 a.m. ⏰ Leaving from Geneva to Krakow 

I’ll be honored to give give a talk at the “CHEP2024” conference 

It is “Computing in High Energy Physics”, and it’s one of the major conferences in our field 

But why “Computing”?? 

Well, computing plays a major role in our experiments 🧵

We need to:

⚙️ Sift the data from the colliders to only pick the interesting stuff

🔧 Combine data from all detectors to “reconstruct” what happened when protons collide

📀 Organize data

💥 Simulate the expected outcome to check everything’s correct

📊 Smartly analyze data

For each of these tasks, and for the many others I omitted here, we need dedicated software and computing techniques 

And that’s not something we find on the market…

So, the physicists and engineers working on the experiments need to design, write , and develop these ad-hoc software and techniques from scratch

And the CHEP conference is one of the major venues to present and discuss the most recent advancements in the field! 

Coming, Krakow!

Journey to CHEP2024: The Role of Computing in High Energy Physics

On Friday, I attended a historical symposium here at CERN, organized to celebrate the long career of Carlo Rubbia, 1984 Nobel laureate for Physics.

I took this picture at the moment of the birthday cake 🎂 

In the picture, Carlo Rubbia is on the right, while Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General, is on the left.

At the symposium, the speakers recounted the different steps, branches, and successes of Carlo Rubbia’s long scientific life (as well as his not-so-sweet personality!😉)

And, in the room, in addition to Rubbia himself, there were many “giant” physicists, the ones who made the history of particle physics, and physics in general, in the XX century!

It has been a real honor to participate! 🤗

I think the recording of the speeches will be available soon, I'll share them as soon as they are published

Also, I’ll post more about that as soon as I reorganize the many pictures I took that day

So, follow me not to miss that!👌😉 — Have a good day!
-
#cern #physics #science

Celebrating Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia's 90th Birthday at CERN

At the bottom of this pit, the UA1 experiment was taking the data that lead to the Nobel Prize in 1984 for Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer! 

🧵

Today, I went to visit the lab of colleagues working on the construction of new “muon chambers” (detectors specifically built to detect 'muons', subatomic particles somehow similar to electrons). 

And their lab is exactly above the historical pit on the SPS particle accelerator at CERN!

I could not resist to take a selfie at that historical and iconic place! 🤩

Would you like to know more about the UA1 experiment and the Nobel prize it brought?

#cern #nobel #physics

Exploring the UA1 Experiment at CERN

Morning remote meeting in the @cern cafeteria with blossoms in the background! How lovely! 🌸🤗

I enjoy joining remote meetings in the morning from the CERN cafeteria. It’s quiet at that time (it starts to get busy around 11 a.m.), and when it's sunny, the view is fantastic ☀️

Additionally, during spring, the trees outside are covered in beautiful purple blossoms!!!

A lovely spot for meetings, isn't it? 😉

How about you? Where's your favorite place to join remote meetings? 🙂 Drop a comment below👇

Wishing you a wonderful and sunny day!

Morning Remote Meeting at CERN

Radiation dose limits are tricky!

They’ve been difficult to set properly

Limits on acceptable radiation dose got smaller and smaller over the years, in parallel with discoveries about the biological effects
👇

—
#physics #typefully #radiation

Back in the early days, short after radioactivity was discovered, limits on exposure time were based only on the effects we could see, such as:

• skin rashes
• burns
• ulcers
• vomiting 
• …

In 1902 the first recommendation on radiation exposure was set to 10 rad / day or…

…3000 rad / year!

But nobody knew the effects deep inside our cells… 😖

Then, the effects on cells and organs were found 

And later the effect of radiation on our DNA was discovered!

…and a lot of the official radiation dose limits were rewritten

Today, many countries set max acceptable dose limit to ~0.1 rem / year  (1 mSv/y)

…that is, about 10’000 times lower than initially set!! 😱

Radiation protection has done major steps in protecting us from the radiation technology👌

P.S. a few notes on quantities:

• for electrons and photons (that is, “beta” and “gamma” radiation) 1 rad is equal to 1 rem

• and 1 rem is about 10 mSv 

—
Questions? Just ask in the comments! 👇
I love questions! 🤗

Navigating Radiation Dose Limits

Talking to aliens📡👽

Few people know that a particle physicist was one of the first talking about communicating with alien civilizations!

In 1959,then-CERN physicist Giuseppe Cocconi, published a paper with a provocative title:

"Searching for Interstellar Communications"

While at Cornell University, Giuseppe Cocconi started speculating with his colleague Philip Morrison:

— Giuseppe: “You know what, Phil? If there are people out there, won’t they communicate with gamma rays that'll cross the whole galaxy?" 

—
#physics #aliens #typefully

— Phil: “Gee, I know nothing about that. They will cross the galaxy. It’s very thin in hydrogen. But not all that well. There will be some loss."

— Giuseppe: "What about radio? I don’t know much about radio, but I understand there is a lot of radio out there. Why not use radio? It’s much cheaper. You get many more photons per watt and that must be what counts." 

…and then they began working on that idea!

And pretty soon they knew enough about radio astronomy to publish the paper that was the foundation of the well-known SETI project for the search of alien life!

👽 👾👌😊

TBH, I think there must be other forms of life “out there”; but communication could be hard or impossible… 

And what about you? 
Do you think there’s life out there? ✨

—
BTW: You can listen the whole story told by Philip Morrison himself, here 👇

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/audio/30591-1 

Talking to Aliens: The Pioneer Physicist

It was 1984 when the future LHC collider finally got its official home in the LEP tunnel!

A first version of the project foresaw the cohabitation of the two colliders, as in the pic below

That was later discarded, and LEP was dismantled to make way for LHC

—
#CERN #typefully

For the interested ones, here you can find the proceedings of the 1984 workshop:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/154938/files/CERN-84-10-V-1.pdf


The Evolution of the LHC Collider

That’s very cool, the plot on the right, in the middle 👇

That “mountain shaped” data visualization is called “Lego plot”

…and you probably guess why 😉

It shows the amount of energy deposited by particles in the sensors of the “calorimeters”

—
#dataviz #typefully

The calorimeters are detectors which measure the energy of the particles by “absorbing” them

They calotimeters are circular, shaped like big barrels around the point where protons smash into each other

But the Lego Plot unfold them on a plane, showing the deposits in a very cool, elegant, and effective way! 📈👍

…and the data points look like Lego bricks! 😁

BTW, the visualization here visualizes the data of the “Beam Splash” test we run on Friday,

The one where we catch the huge spray of particles created by the CERN Large Hadron
Collider

 I wrote about that here 👇

https://twitter.com/drric_physics/status/1767185450224222308?s=46&t=BC3-A9KtMgpuODALTAVtkw

The Intriguing Lego Plot

Here it is, for your eyes' pleasure! 😍

A just-approved visualization of the "Beam Splash" data from last Friday!

There,you see how the different sensors in the @ATLASexperiment react when hit by splashes of particles!

I'll tell you more👇🧵

—
#CERN #physics #typefully

First of all,that "Beam Splash" was created by "Beam 2" of the Large Hadron Collider

It enters the ATLAS experiment from the "C" side towards the Jura mountains and travels to the "A" side towards the city of Geneva

and creates a "splash" of particles hitting a collimator

That huge splash of particles moves along the beam pipe toward the ATLAS experiment

And hits the experiments as a "front of particles" 🌊

So, in the pic, particles belonging to the "splash" move from left to right 👉

And you see how ATLAS reacts to them...

In the main 3D view, you see the reactions of different sensors to the energy that the particles deposited along their way through the experiment

Starting from the center, you see the energy caught by the "tracking" detectors, the "calorimeters", and the "muon chambers"

In the right images, you see two different zoomed-in views of the same measurements on the transversal plane

In the top-right view you see the measurements in the "tracking" detectors and the energy deposits in the "calorimeters" of the central region (called the "barrel")

In the bottom-right view, you see a zoomed-in view of the energy deposits in the "tracking" detectors only

(namely, the "TRT", the "Transition Radiation Tracker" detector)

But why this visualization is so "busy" and colorful?

It looks so "full" and "busy" because the "Beam Splash" test is made exactly with that purpose in mind

That test creates a huge splash of particles to hit all sensors of the ATLAS experiment to:

• check that everything is in order
• verify that all parts work in sync

And it looks so colorful, because all sensors react very strongly to that amount of energy released by the moving particles created in the "Beam Splash"

So, all sensors react at "full maximum"! 🙌

Because of that, during such tests, we always switch OFF the most delicate  sensors:

the two most inner "tracking" detectors ⚡️

The "Pixel" and the "SCT" (the Semi-Conductor Tracker") detectors, in fact, were OFF on Friday and they do not appear in the pic.

And now...

Stay tuned for the other forthcoming tests toward the new "physics" data!

The "Horizontal muons" test should come soon...

...and I'll tell you about it, of course! 👍😉

Have a good day! ☀️👋