Stranger in our midst

13 July 2010

Colliding Particles - Episode 1: Codename Eurostar from Mike Paterson.


A three-year documentary film project, which follows two ATLAS physicists and features many more, is nearing completion, and filmmaker Mike Paterson was in Copenhagen to see the Collaboration in action and capture the excitement of the ICHEP approval talks.

Mike's project, Colliding Particles, comprises seven 10-minute Internet shorts, which explore the long-term nature of research – a mundane truth that is often poorly conveyed in the media. Funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the shorts have a 'throughline' following UCL ATLAS physicist Jonathan Butterworth, his PhD student Adam Davison, and Paris-based theorist Gavin Salam.

In the first episode we learn that the team have come up with a novel analysis – 'Project Eurostar' – for discovering the Higgs, which subsequently becomes accepted among the official ATLAS search channels.

“It's a smarter way of finding the Higgs when it is travelling very fast,” explains Jonathan. “It will decay to a spray of hadrons, and we came up with a good way of picking that spray, or jet, apart and finding the traces of the Higgs decay. ”

The paper itself is an artificial line weaving in and out of the films; a vehicle for exploring how fundamental research works, how ideas are shared, what motivates physicists, the day-to-day realities of experimental and theoretical physics, and what the LHC project is all about.

Ironically, Mike ended up learning more about the long timescales involved in experimental particle physics than he'd bargained for: “We started filming in summer 2008, before Big Bang Day,” he explains. “We planned to film for the following 18 months, but obviously it's got quite a bit longer, what with the…'hiccup' in the middle.”

Mike was in Copenhagen to gather footage for the build-up to the finale. The last film, number seven, will finish with the public presentation of some of the first LHC data at ICHEP in Paris this summer. “That will give us a kind of punctuation mark,” Mike smiles. “Not a full stop, but a kind of comma.”

“I was at the beginning of my second year when we started and I must have been filmed five or six times since," Adam recalls. "It's very interesting to look back now and watch those earlier videos. They cover some of the most exciting parts of my PhD, the LHC startup being the obvious one."

Although he says he was apprehensive about being filmed at first, he soon relaxed into the project when the films emerged, and he received positive comments from colleagues at CERN (not to mention a national newspaper pointing out his resemblance to a popular British actor).

“I think there's a general perception that research is this mysterious, esoteric place. These films show the human side, that we're real people doing this interesting work,” he says, adding: “I think that's really important for teenagers thinking about a science degree, to see that it's an environment they might enjoy working in.”

Jonathan too is impressed by how well Mike has managed to portray the particle physicist's reality, and hopes the films will have an influence on a broader scale:

“The LHC's impact in the media is a real opportunity to give people an insight into the ongoing story of research behind the big headlines … I like Mike's approach, which is to give a genuine flavour of what it feels like to do research; he's good at picking out humour and at telling a real story.”

Once the films are complete, Mike hopes that they might be re-edited and sewn together as a single full-length TV documentary. And the possibility of returning in three or four years to film an extra episode, if Project Eurostar proves its worth, is not completely off the cards.

“Maybe, who knows,” he laughs. “It's gone on for a lot longer than I thought it would, and I'm quite looking forward to doing something else. But maybe in four years time…”

“What they do is not very interesting to watch on a day-to-day basis – sitting in front of computers and talking to each other in some alien language," he muses. "But what they actually do [long-term] is fascinating.”

 

Ceri Perkins

ATLAS e-News