ATLAS Week: What's the point?!

13 July 2010

Informal discussions about work and the World Cup


The brilliant sunshine and sparkling waters of Copenhagen were the setting for the 2010 summer ATLAS Overview week, and spirits were high: According to locals, ATLAS managed to stumble upon the best week of sun the city had seen all year, the World Cup was heating up along with the weather (Copenhagen can seemingly rival Geneva for international supporter flavour too)… and then there was the small matter of ICHEP results approval.

With around 15 hours of talks dedicated to this alone, many cited it as a major draw for attending the conference this year. In particular, those who had been busy working on their own analyses were looking forward to getting their heads above water and catching up with everything else that had been going on around them lately.

“This one feels special somehow,” was the view of Deputy Spokesperson Andy Lankford, by virtue of it being the first time that real LHC collision data had been under consideration at an external ATLAS Week. “We're beginning to get more data and more interesting results.”

Manuel Kayl, a fourth year PhD student based at NIKHEF, Amsterdam, was at the conference to present a note. “What's different about ATLAS Weeks abroad is the composition of people,” he considered. “In Geneva you can more or less just go to your office and work, so you only go to selected talks, but abroad the whole audience is tied together all of the time.”

For ATLAS regulars, the sight of that kind of audience has probably long since lost its impact, but third year PhD student Kevin Mercurio – attending his first ATLAS Week, and on his way to CERN for the first time from Harvard – saw the scene with fresh eyes: “For some reason I hadn't foreseen walking into a room with literally hundreds of physicists all on laptops at the same time,” he said. “The scale [of the Collaboration] is a bit intimidating but I think I'm finally finding my place.”

ATLAS Weeks in general are a chance for collaborators to get together and go over all the different aspects of the experiment; operations, physics results, the upgrade, and everything in between. But according to CERN fellow Kirill Prokofiev, in Copenhagen on his first external ATLAS Week, the week away from CERN is “somehow a bigger event”.

“ATLAS Weeks at CERN are relatively regular, but smaller in scale,” he explained, “but this is more like a yearly milestone: A big count of all the things – like what we have achieved since last year. That's very important.”

For University of Granada postdoc Nuno Castro, the brainstorming sessions on organisational topics such as shift and service work coverage and the results approval process are an especially valuable feature of the external meetings. But, like others based away from Geneva, the overview weeks at CERN offer him the added efficiency of tagging shift work onto the start or end of a trip.

But whether at CERN or away, he said, “For those of us who are not based at CERN these weeks are excellent occasions to be closer to data and to talk personally with our colleagues.”

In the absence of everyday commitments, informal discussions are more prevalent at external ATLAS Weeks, he reckoned, pointing out: “With so many interesting results popping out during the talks, [these informal discussions are] quite focused on LHC physics these days. But the World Cup has been an off-side hot topic too!”

The 'captive audience' effect – getting people together away from CERN and the distractions of their normal day-to-day routines – spills over into social time too, which is no bad thing, according to Andy: “There's a certain degree of bonding goes on … people spend more time together outside the meetings.”


“People are more open in a 'meeting people' kind of way,” agreed Columbia postdoc Kathy Copic, based 50/50 between CERN and New York City. “To somehow be stuck together – in hotels and on the bus – somehow people are a little more friendly.”

This rings true both for those who are based together at CERN, but rarely mix outside of Restaurant 1 or meetings, and those who have collaborated at a distance. For Manuel, this meant spending downtime with the CERN-based co-authors of his note after weeks of communicating over Skype and Evo, and for others it meant putting faces they had never seen to names and voices with which were already very familiar.

In the end, employing some expressive hand gestures and a big grin, Kathy summed up neatly what many picked out as one of the nicest things about ATLAS Week, whether held at CERN or abroad:

“ATLAS Week is great because it's the kind of place where someone can come up to you, tell you their name and then say, 'You know me from…” she explained, illustrating her point by making a frantic typing motion with her hands. “Because you do know them! You've probably exchanged a lot of emails with them, but you've never met them in person before.”

 

Ceri Perkins

ATLAS e-News