July 12

There's not really much to write about today. We had two lectures today, one on the physics of particle accelerators and one on cosmology. This afternoon, we heard presentations on the different working groups and made our choices. I just had the initial meeting with my working group, so I have some free time until I meet with the rest of the Americans after supper.

My working group is made up of 6 of us....Keith from UK, Ondreij from Czech Republic, Bernd who teaches in Jerusalem but is originally from Germany, Maria from Romania, and Mark and I from the US. We are working with Konrad Jende from Germany, a PhD student at CERN. We will be developing a new Masterclass based on information coming off the ATLAS detector. For interested parties....ATLAS stands for A Torroidal LHC ApparatuS. It is one of the two larger detectors on the accelerator ring. There is currently a Masterclass, but it is based on old information from the LEP, the accelerator that was at CERN before the LHC came along. Masterclass is designed to teach participants to analyze the information coming off a detector and find out what kind of interaction it is....hadron shower, muon event, Higgs Boson, etc. Here is a picture of something that would be used:


There are Masterclass sessions all over the world, although in the US we do ours through Fermilab. We will meet shortly tomorrow before our tours to begin work, and most of the next 2 weeks, this will be our task.
I was going to take a picture today of the French/Swiss border, but I forgot walking across it. Maybe tomorrow.
Today I have felt the effects of my weekend. I stayed up until after midnight putting pictures on facebook last night, and I was tired all day. My feet were torn up by walking in flip-flops through the rain Saturday and blistered from sweaty shoes yesterday. The World Cup ended about 11 here, and there was a lot of noise around. Then about an hour later, those coming back from the pubs honked their horns all the way through our area, so the celebration lasted quite awhile. We have a man from the Netherlands in the program, Stavros, who was originally from Greece, and two from Spain, Jorge and Eva, so there was some good-hearted ribbing today.
Since I have no new photos to add today, I will put the link of my photo albums on Facebook for anyone not a "friend"
www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27837&id=100000149918038&l=bfcf86307e
www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27642&id=100000149918038&l=9ee71a2c07
Now, hopefully I'll find my bed a little sooner tonight.