ATLAS e-News

Networking at Trigger and Physics week

29 November 2007

‘Make friends, socialise and network, network, network’ was the general consensus amongst attendees of November’s Trigger and Physics week, held at CERN. The meeting ran from the 5th to the 8th of November. It attracted many young (and some not so young) ATLAS members who work from their home institute, giving them the opportunity to come to CERN and meet colleagues they only knew by e-mail addresses.

“A lot of the week is about seeing someone give a talk, contacting them, discussing their work over coffee, and learning something new,” said Dugan O’Neil, who works on offsite computing at Simon Fraser University, Canada. As a member of the Tau Working Group, Dugan is involved in developing new algorithms to identify tau particles in the ATLAS detector, and finds the Trigger weeks invaluable for networking.

“The great thing about it is that, for Trigger and Physics, just about everybody you need to talk to is here, whereas most of the time we’re spread all over the world,” he said. “Communication face to face is way more efficient than by email or any other means.”

A lot of the week is about seeing someone give a talk, contacting them, discussing their work over coffee, and learning something new

Throughout the week, speakers addressed problems ranging from trigger menus at various luminosities to details of data analysis with the first data.

But the individual presentations were just the tip of the iceberg. Jennifer Godfrey, one of Dugan’s Masters students, found that the week gave her a constructive overview of the whole project: “It’s really useful for seeing all the different aspects coming together. It’s not often I get to see the big picture, because I’m usually so focussed on building a single algorithm.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Alan Phillips, a PhD student working on tau fast simulation and supersymmetry at the University of Cambridge, UK: “For a long time now, a large number of people have been putting a lot of work into the project, so it’s great to see it all coming together,” he said. “It’s also exciting to hear the updates on how the ATLAS detector is coming along, now we’re so close to the switch-on next year.”

Attendees identified coffee breaks, lunchtimes and evenings as key times for networking and discussion.

Ceri Perkins