ATLAS overview week in Barcelona

20 October 2009

Palm trees and city lights near the location of the banquet reception.

This was the first ATLAS week I had attended outside of Geneva. Location: sunny Barcelona, and sunny it was! The weather was beautiful, blue skies every day, and with temperatures topping 30 degrees I needn’t have brought all those woolly tights! In between talks, coffee was held out in the sunshine with plenty of nibbles to keep glucose levels up for the last overview meetings before the big turn on, number 2. The talks focused on detector status, first data analysis, and how we would get this data to scientists working all over the globe. The big question was: are we ready?

Having only attended ATLAS weeks at CERN I was not prepared for the sheer number and scale of social events held and the organisers did a fantastic job keeping all of us physicists entertained. After a day of updates on detector status we were invited to the prestigious Palau de Pedralbes – for those of you with as good Catalan as I, Palau means Palace – designed by Barcelona’s own Antoni Gaudí. Walking through giant gates, past fountains and ivy footpaths into this palace littered with enormous vases, portraits and fireplaces, we began to wonder if we were in the right place. Cava and beautifully presented canapés, tapas style of course, awaited us followed by speeches before the mingling began. A great way to end the first day!

The second gave insight into the computing and data preparation, and our first of many brainstorming sessions, a premier for ATLAS week. At first we were not sure what these would consist of or how they would go. A few slides on the brainstorming topic were given posing open questions, options and constraints, then the floor was open for people to have their say. The sessions flowed very nicely and interesting ideas and conclusions seemed to start appearing through the discussions.

The ATLAS Women’s Network had organised a special lunch on Wednesday, after we had been working our way through aspects of trigger and cosmics. These lunches are held weekly at CERN but not normally with Tiina Wickstroem attempting to photograph us without our mouths half open with food! Fifty-five of us met for this lunch to chat and catch up on the most recent activities organised by the Women’s Network, which was a huge success and enjoyed by all.

The next event on the social agenda was hosted on top of a mountain overlooking Barcelona city at Fundació Miró, an art museum exhibiting Miró’s wide ranging collection of large canvases and sculptures, my favorite being that of a giant egg balancing on a six foot high base. Interesting work. This was followed by yet another cava and tapas style canapé reception outside with front row seats to that amazing view. No one fell in the swimming pool to some people’s disappointment, and after getting shuttled down the mountain, 400 physicists flocked into Barcelona city searching for some Catalan culture.

Twas Thursday already when we finally got on to some physics, and the special lunch that day was for outreach, which was much in the style of the eminent brainstorming sessions. Topics: how do we translate what we are doing at ATLAS to the media, how do we dispel fears and encourage interest? Ideas buzzed around the room and we hit upon a difficult question of how we describe the importance of Higgs boson to the general public. To the rescue came our very own ATLAS e-News editor Pauline Gagnon with a beautifully pitched sound bite: “If all the particles were the Simpsons family, one could say we are missing Homer!

That very evening was the conference banquet which was really something special. We assembled at Maremagnum near to Barcelona’s port. A marvelous feast was had by all, with after diner speeches by Peter Jenni and Fabiola Gianotti that went down a treat. And then there was the ‘surprise entertainment’ – the most fantastic music and dancing from Spanish culture. Well this set the mood and that night once again Barcelona was inundated with scientists feeling the Catalan groove and the nightclubs filled. Yet somehow Friday morning there was still little seating to be found in a full yet perhaps slightly sleepy conference hall as we were given an overview of the upgrade status.

And then, as quickly as it began and we were being whisked off to our first cava reception at the palace, it was all over. A whirlwind of a week filled with talks and brainstorming, tapas and drinks, special lunches and all night dancing. I guess it’s not supposed to be a relaxing week, and since we will have so much to do when the LHC starts running next month, ‘relaxing’ probably won’t be on the menu for some time. It’s going to be full power ahead for the next few months, years even, if we want to find this elusive Homer Simpson.

 

More photos in this week's gallery and linked from the conference pages.

 

 

 

Kate Shaw

University of Sheffield