Profile

On the weekends I usually like to be doing something so I often go shopping and for walks with my partner. I’m lucky to live near lots of farm land so can go on some really nice walks where we often come across the local cats. I love animals so whenever possible I love going to visit farms and petting zoos – from time to time I even get to visit my partners family dog!

I’m not someone who likes to sit still so I usually like to be doing a couple of things at once. One that I find quite nice to do on an evening to switch off is watching my latest tv series (i.e. Greys Anatomy) while doing some drawing on my iPad. I love having this time to myself in the evening as a wind down after a day at work.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  is a the largest particle accelerator in the world – it collides particles called hadrons at speeds near that of the speed of light. We can study what happens in these collisions and what particles are created – this gives us more information about the universe around us. The experiment I work on (Forward Search Experiment – FASER for short), is located in an old service tunnel in theLHC. The detector hopes to detect particles produced in collisions but missed by the ATLAS detector. Between FASER and ATLAS there is about 500m of rock which means a lot of the background that would contaminate our signal is absorbed here.

As the detector is underground in the LHC and this environment becomes highly radioactive when running – we remotely control our detector. This is pretty cool and is something I get to be involved in. As with many collaborations in physics, we use members of the collaboration on a shift pattern to control the detector and various operations surrounding this. I’m lucky that I get to control the detector for a week each time I’m on shift – this is one of the most unique and fun parts of my job. Knowing I get to control everything in the detector from my laptop is awesome!

Once we have the data I’m part of the team that works on analysing it. It usually takes us around a year to analyse data and get to a result – this may seem like a lot but this we have a lot of data to look at. Typically we decide which particle we want to search for or study ( i.e. a particle that may be able to interact with dark matter) and we use large computer simulations to come up with a plan for how we will analyse the data. After we’ve got a result we present this to other physicists at conferences around the world before writing it up in a paper.

I like to start everyday by writing down things I need to get done on my iPad – I often get sidetracked so this is essential to getting the job done! I also check my calendar when I get to the office to check what meetings I may have in the day. If I’m on shift I will also check what tests experts are wanting to run on the detector that day – maybe having to attend meetings about this.

Everyday contains some data analysis as this is my main focus– for me this just means coding and creating graphs. I enjoy the coding I get to do – the little blue squares that light up when I update my code on GitLab is a good incentive to. On days where I finish a bit of code that produces a graph that I want – I send some results to supervisory team so we can discuss this together. Research is all about working together so this is one of the most important parts of the day.

Some days I take tour groups around CERN – this is one of my favourite things to do. In recent weeks I’ve taken different groups down to the ATLAS detector and got to explain the hardware and physics behind it. I love this as I get to answer questions about physics and detectors.

Towards the end of the day  – I like to make notes of things I may want to look at tomorrow. This often includes ideas I want to explore, or how I want to change my code the next day. I like to write these down so I don’t forget them.