Elective: Week 2

I don't want it to sound too much like I'm just spending my time visiting mountains, but that is at least some of what I'm doing while I'm here. In fact, on the Sunday of my first week (after I, apparently prematurely, posted the week 1 blog) I headed up to Zermatt, home of the Matterhorn. For those who are unaware, that is the Toblerone mountain. My many fans on 'stagram will be aware that I attempted the photo lining up the Matterhorn with the Toblerone one, only to be thwarted by the clouds. Despite the massive disappointment, I still managed to have a good day in the incredible scenery of the adjacent mountains and the glacier. I didn't manage to spot the bear in real life, unfortunately.

On Monday, I was working at HEPIA at Lina's lab where the students had come back. That meant walking past approximately twenty million undergrads, all in one indoor space. Again, after so long in lockdown, the transition to """"the new normal"""" is sort of jarring, especially in a country several months ahead, and I can't help but stare disappointedly at all the undergrads walking around wearing masks as chin guards. (why do people do this????)

My work this week has been extending the radiation protection simulations I was working on last week to all the three Xenon isotopes we're using. These will calculate what kind of radiation dose someone might get from working on the experiment, when we get hold of Xenons -129m, -131m, and -133m. As of yet, the best dose-rate calculations I can make for this are order-of-magnitude, since the design of the experimental set-up is not finalised, and the exact chemical composition of every material used is unknown to me (not a chemist). These simulations are very lengthy and prone to make the computer run out of memory, but ultimately produce about three numbers which I feel I can trust, and which suggest that the experiment will be safe to a trained staff member in the vicinity. They also look rather pretty (see fig. 1)

Figure 1: rather pretty

The other piece of work I'm now doing is adjusting the code which the previous MSc students on my project wrote. I told Magda in our meeting last week that I was familiar with MATLAB, which was definitely true 3 years ago. Despite this, I've had to learn how MATLAB's graphical user interface works, and also relearn most nuclear physics, i.e. what nuclear spin means for nuclear decays, what Zeeman splitting is. The depth of my ignorance was astounding, and honestly it's helpful to get some perspective every once in a while! Conversely, on Wednesday I spent about three hours having a sit-down (masked) discussion with Jean-Noël, an imaging physicist who is part of the programme, and Lina, about the signals that'd been measured from previous experimental work. Very hearteningly, I almost completely followed what was going on, and managed to come up with some useful information which led to us understanding what we were looking at. This great power of course brings with it the great responsibility that no doubt pushes researchers through their careers: it's now my responsibility to make some sense out of this experiment, being one of the 5 or so people who understand it best in the world. Heavy.

On Friday night I went out with some other physicists who I met via undergrad friends, for what ended up being my second installation of noodle soup that day. It ended up being a really nice night, with some limited opportunities to practice French, which I seem intermittently un/able to do. Switzerland continues to amaze with its extreme prices: a meal plus three drinks ended up costing ~£51(!). I bought lunch at the canteen at HEPIA on Tuesday and it cost ~£19(!) Pro tip: do not live in Switzerland if you get paid in GBP, in this pandemic/Brexit economy the exchange rate will not work in your favour, on top of the extreme cost of living. I've done it so you don't have to.

Moving the experiment didn't actually happen this week as I threatened in last week's installation, but should happen next week (hope springs eternal) so expect some fun content with juicy pictures of exactly that.