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My work in one picture:

What’s going on here? This is a computer model of our magnificent beast of a detector, the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It’s a 46 m long, 25 m high, 25 m wide, 7000-tonne machine that takes “quantum pictures” of fundamental (much, much smaller than an atom!) particles. “Where do these particles come from?” I hear you ask in the back; well, the answer is what got me properly interestd in physics when I was in highschool.

Growing up near Geneva myself, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, take a tour of the machines and talk to scientists there. They explained to me, very casually, that “all they did” was get a bunch of regular ol’ protons (you can find those in every atom, how convenient!) and accelerate them along a 27km ring up to 99.9999991% the speed of light. That’s an absurdly large speed! “How” they do that is quite interesting, but “why” is really the kicker: because the faster these protons go before they get smashed into each other, the more energy they pack. Nothing new here. But the beautiful thing is that you don’t need a degree in physics to understand what that means, if you’ve ever heard of a little equation by a certain Albert…

E=mc^2

Everyone’s seen or heard this before, even if they don’t quite realise what it means! If you have mass, the “m” on the right-hand side, this is equivalent to having energy! (the “E” on the left). But, and that was truly mind-blowing to my younger self, it also means that if you have enough energy, you can create mass! you can create matter!

And smashing protons in a humongous collider achieves just that.

Fortunately, us physicists were smart enough to place our big ATLAS detector just around the collision point, so we could capture (almost) all the particles that we made. If you go back to the picture at the top, it should make more sense now: you can see the (grey) tubes carrying the high-speed protons to the collision point, from which a whole bunch of new particles emerge (orange lines) and are captured and measured by our detector (in blue).

My job is to sift through billions (yes, litteral billions) of these pictures (using fancy computer code, of course!) and try to tell what the particles we produced were. Most of the time, it’s uninteresting junk. Sometimes, it’s cool, heavy particles that don’t normally exist in nature. Once in a while, you might even get the so-called Higgs boson that won a nobel prize to its namesake Peter, back in 2012. But my hope is that, even more rare and hidden amongst all this data, are the elusive new, exotic particles I (and many others) are after. More on that in the chats…

PS: the picture above shows a real collision event! Taken on June 4th 2015, it is one of these interesting events I’m studying, and almost the 20 millionth collision at that time.

My typical day varies quite a lot. And that’s good, because I’m one of these people who struggle to keep a routine… I usually wake up late, because most of my meetings are in the afternoon and I enjoy working in the later hours (that’s when I get my best ideas!). Tea or coffee, depending on the mood of the day, are consumed at regular intervals to facilitate the transformation of these ideas into computer code I can actually use to study my little particles.

There’s a lot of talking too. Whether I’m presenting the results of a project, discussing with colleagues or chatting with friends in the break room, we’re constantly bouncing ideas off each other. Modern science is all about working together – I’m only one of 3000 physicists working on my experiment alone!

Most of the time I’m listening to music and that helps make the more boring aspects of my job (e.g. paperwork…) seem almost interesting. I’m always excited when I know I’m going to teach later in the day, sometimes to the point of making it difficult to focus on other tasks. It’s a wonderful way to share hard-earned knowledge and realise that, after all these years, I know one or two interesting things about physics!

I’ve been trying to get back to doing sports in the evening (I was a keen cyclist and rower), but I find cooking also relaxing. Working with dough (bread, pasta, pizza, you name it) is very therapeutic, and I enjoy sharing a meal with my housemate after a long day.