COMPASS: Common Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy

What the COMPASS experiment is actually? I barely remember the name the abbreviation stands for... But I know some basic stuff I can share. I doubt I will ever understand the physics behind it anyway :)

So COMPASS is an experiment at the second largest working particle accelerator on Earth: the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) from 1976. The experiment is in Prevessin, which is France and a couple of kilometers from Meyrin, the main CERN site in Switzerland. So you pay in euros and the food is maybe a little better :)

COMPASS investigates the way quarks and gluons interact to create particles like protons and neutrons, which you actually may have heard of in high school. So we collide some small thingies called muons, supposedly something like heavy electrons. I might describe the magic behind how it's done when I actually know more about it...

There are about 300 people from different countries working on this. My group consist of a bunch of Czech guys from CTU and Charles University. Most of us do IT but there are also some physicists. We are known as the Czech mafia because the guys keep wearing black coats and hats :)

Luckily enough, I was able to see the experiment this week. It is not accessible when the beam is on, so we were pretty lucky to get to see everything. You can have a look at how it looks like.

Every person entering the experiment needs to take a key with them.
Just to make sure you won't stay in there without somebody knowing about you. 

One of the magnets. Red as usual :)

The triggers are to be touched by experts only :)
The crazy system of wires looked very organized to me... 

What Do I Work On?

I thought I would write something meaningful and cool about COMPASS, what it is, etc. But I am super tired after trying to understand code written by a very creative French physicist 12 years ago. Some parts of it are really very... surprising and unorthodox. Or whatever you call it.

So what do I do here now? I am rewriting COMPASS logbook to something that would look more like from the 21st century. The logbook is on-line monitoring tool and kind of a journal for anything that happens at the experiment. There is information about every shift, the detectors settings, notes,... So some php and MySQL stuff.

The funny thing is after I finish with it, there will be people using it 24/7 for a decade or something. I think I will make it pink and include some Hello Kitty pictures to improve the user experience :) Oh, I almost forgot, the old logbook is in Comic Sans. I think I will need to keep it at least as an optional setting :)

This is the COMPASS control room and the logbook.
(The screens are usually not that red.)

My name is on our door now. Yayyyy! :)

How I Got My CERN Card Vol. 2

So... I am back here :) It didn't even take too long. So how did I end up at CERN? I met a few cool guys from my home department during the summer here. Then we went out in Prague again and I ended up joining the team to work on my master thesis at COMPASS. I will write a separate post about what it is.
How does it work? I will go to CERN several times during the next year, probably for a few weeks at a time. I will also work on the project in Prague of course. I will recode the COMPASS logbook, which is an ancient piece of on-line monitoring system, written by a physicist nicknamed "the monster". Sounds like fun :)

My classmate (and a new roommate) Martinek and I arrived yesterday. It felt a little surreal to be back, see the same old familiar places without the familiar people... Anyway, I managed to get a new
CERN card, which is a big deal of course, because there's "CERN" written on it :) I didn't even need to take a new picture, which was nice. So here it is. More information coming soon.

Martinek with his super old bills (a gift from his grandma)

My CERN cad number two