So finally I am at my own desk for longer than a couple of hours which gives me a chance to really start blogging.
The new working year really kick-started me into high gears immediately. I spent already the third working day on the plane, going to SLAC near San Francisco for a workshop on the ‘Machine-Detector Interface (MDI)’ of the International Linear Collider (ILC). The definition of what exactly the ‘Machine-Detector Interface’ is is really not easy and is actually still under discussion in the respective working group. Basically it deals with everything where the design of the accelerator has a potential impact on the design of the big detectors planned to record the physics reactions at the collision points of the ILC.
Well, travelling so close to the holiday season usually is a hassle: Long queues everywhere, full flights, delays, etc. I really prepared for the worst but things evolved quite nicely when British Airways upgraded me to their very nice business class on the outbound flight. Why British Airways? Well there are no direct transatlantic flights leaving from Hamburg. So whenever we have to travel outside Europe we have to go through one of the big hubs: Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, London, etc. And the DESY travel policy is to choose the cheapest flights available, so I know all of these airports quite well. Usually I don’t like Heathrow too much, because it is located on an island. A few years ago this really was a problem when I was dumped in Heathrow in the biggest storm hitting the British islands since a long time. It is really hard to escape from an island when neither planes nor ferries nor trains are running….
Well this time British Airways was the right choice, everything went nice and smoothly.
The stay at SLAC was a little bit disappointing though. The workshop was interesting, the organisation was excellent, but the weather…. I mean I knew they had like monsoon season in January, but it really rained cats and dogs for the biggest part of the four days I stayed there.
Coming back a week ago I just spent two nights at home before I went to the next workshop at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau near Paris. This time it was a meeting of the physics community interested in designing a detector for the ILC based on gaseous tracking with a big time projection chamber as the heart piece. Being an expert for MDI is big fun, but it also doubles the travel. You have to be at the conferences of both parties, the machine and the detector people.
Paris is always nice. I stayed in a nice old hotel near the Pantheon. This is in the 5eme arrondisement of Paris, which is the part where most of the universities (including the famous Sorbonne) are. So there are many nice restaurants, bars and shops in this area. Not that I had much time to spend there as we had to take the 08:00 am train every morning going the 40 min ride to Palaiseau. And to get from the train station to the Ecole Polytechnique you have to climb a hill on a footpath with a very steep slope. You really curse every glas of red wine you had in the evening then….
Well now I am back at home trying to get a grip on my overflowing mailbox and task list. Of course the backside of travelling is (at least here at DESY) that you are the natural candidate to give a report about the workshops you have been at at the next regular meetings here. So now I have to prepare a summary of the MDI and the detector workshop for our weekly ILC project meeting on Friday as well as for our internal group meeting on Monday.
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