Maaike Limper

Last blog of the year

After my great succes of my talk in Geneva I ofcourse went back in the cleanroom that same weekend to work a bit more... However the week before christmas I had a great excuse to not be in the cleanroom for a little while!
Each year, at the last days before the institute closes, the annual meeting is organised at NIKHEF. All the groups inform the rest of the institute of the work they have been doing. On behalf of my group sct-chick Caroline told everyone about the great progress we've been making with the endcap. Check out these awesome pictures a professional photographer recently made in our cleanroom and which Caroline used for her presentation:

Anyhow, after the talks were finished, it was time for the NIKHEF christmas dinner! Long tables filled our usual coffee room, so that there all the people who have been working hard on their experiments all year could rejoice together while enjoying the French buffet and the various alcoholic beverages... Technician's were made happy! The Antares punks were roaming the building to check if no one was making fun of their detector (and it's apparent succes in detecting fishes) And ofcourse many hungry phd belly's were filled...

Looking back on this year I enjoyed myself a lot: throwing parties, going to summerschools and conferences, teaching the public about physics, teaching at the university, making simulations etcetera!
Ofcourse I've mostly been busy building the sct-endcap. But now it is almost finished and next year me and most of our group will be in Geneva integrating the thing into the rest of the ATLAS-detector. Will it work? Will we ever see real data? Will the higgs particle be discovered?
I'm afraid you will have to wait for the answers. This afternoon I am flying to Buenos Aires where I will spend my new year in summertime! Happy new year and thanks to everyone who was interested in reading my blog! Bye-bye!

The pit

So last thursday and friday, I was at CERN, the European centre for particle physics in Geneva. The snowy Jura mountains gave a beautiful background to the "globe of innovation" which was built last year to celebrate the CERN's 50 year existence.
On the picture you can see behind the globe some buildings. Below these building the ATLAS experiment is building assembled. Two large shafts give access to the cavern to bring down all the different detector components that have been built all over the world. The NIKHEF SCT endcap (my project, my "baby") will go down march/april next year!
Down in the pit you can already see the first parts of the ATLAS detector; the huge coils that form the magnet and in the middle you can see the barrel part of the calorimeter. The calorimeter will measure the energy of the particles created after the high energy collision the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider.
The christmas spirit had even reached the ATLAS pit as was demonstrated by a little tree dangling on top of the construction...

Christmas time is creeping in. The foreign phd's are planning their trips to their families back home and the main hall of NIKHEF is beautifully decorated!
But still some more working days to go. Today I managed to overbook myself, I had to work in the cleanroom, I had a meeting all day, I wanted to finish my presentation for tomorrow and I had to attend the topical lectures! In the end I tried to do a bit of everything... In any case, tonight I will fly to Geneva so that tomorrow morning I can inform our collagues abroad on the great progress we've been making with building the ATLAS SCT endcap! I will come back on friday evening. I guess that maybe I will work a bit in the weekend again if needed.
Last weekend I had to work on saturday morning which was not a great success... I went to sleep late at night on friday evening and arrived as a zombie in the lab in the morning... Luckily my supervisor helped me to keep awake!
Anyways, the annual meeting starts next wednesday and last two days. On this meeting all the groups can report their work of this year to the rest of  NIKHEF. So that leaves only a few more "working days" for this year and on the 28 of december I will fly to Buenos Aires to celebrate the new year there! Hurray! I will still write some more blogs before that but with everyone leaving for their homecountries I won't have anymore exciting parties to report on. Hmz, the annual meeting finishes with a big dinner and some drinks for all of NIKHEF, maybe that could still be interesting...

for molly

I just received a Christmas card from Molly! Molly was ony of my best friends when I was summerstudent at CERN,Geneva in 2003! Here I posted a picture of me, Molly and our croatian friends during one of our many trips around Geneva. After CERN I met Molly once again in november 2003 when we made a small summerstudent reunion in Croatia...
Since that last time I saw her we finished our studies and went to pursue physics on different sides of the Atlantic. It's amazing how she never gave up on writing to me even though I'm too much of a lazy and nasty person to return the favor. She writes me she is reading my blog so I will dedicate this blog to her! Molly, I do appreciate you are still writing to me and you are certainly welcome to stay at my house in Amsterdam when you come to visit (boyfriend included ofcourse). I will probably be at CERN next year from may till november but also then you can comeover and remember the good old days... 
Molly also lets me know that BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory) is having hard time due to Bush budget cutbacks in physics (boo!). Anyhow Molly, if you decide to pursue another carreer, where you will help people instead of discover particles, than I certainly think that's a great idea!

typical Dutch family

Together with my french and Italian housemates we are like a little family. And so like a typical Dutch family we went to go iceskating on sunday afternoon at the "Jaap Eden baan".
I never learned how to iceskate... Years of stumbling around on the ice as a child and I never managed to learn... Anyhow that's how I ended up stumbling around on the ice with my housemates last sunday. Claudine was skating circles around me like a princess on ice and Antonello had to remind me that we were actually doing this for fun.
But actually it was fun! So I'll try to go again this week, maybe someday I can still learn...
Anyhow sports was never my thing so maybe that's why I became a scientist. In the lab we have been making some excellent progress towards finishing our "SCT endcap" which should be shipped to CERN at the beginning of next year. Next year I will also go to work and live at CERN, Geneva, where I can help to install the SCT endcap in ATLAS. I know Geneva rather well from when I was a summerstudent in 2003! Ah, those good old days! I guess next year I will have a bit less time for parties (see summerstudent link) but I look forward to seeing all the work of me and my collagues alive and working in the heart of ATLAS...
Anyways talking about CERN, I will fly to Geneva next week to give a talk on how our work at NIKHEF is going at the ATLAS inner detector meeting.  This will be a nice talk to give since we made so much progress already, I like to be the bringer of good news! After the inner detector meeting next week the work for me this year will be almost over... On the 21-22 of december there will be the NIKHEF annual meeting, where all the different physics groups at NIKHEF will report on the work which has been done last year. The annual meeting tradionally ends with dinner and drinks for the whole of NIKHEF which is always a lot of fun!
But before the year finishes there is still a lot of work to do, I need to continue to help with our tests in the lab, I need to prepare my presentation and tonight I need to celebrate Sinterklaas! Sinterklaas is Dutch tradition which this year I will celebrate with my housemates (like the typical Dutch family that we are...)
Sinterklaas comes on the the 5th of december to bring presents and funny poems to all the good boys and girls. This year he left them under the christmas tree (see picture), we didn't have time to open them last night, so we will do so tonight!

de oude DND pagina

In volledig ongerelateerd nieuws kan ik nog vertellen dat ik mijn "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons"-pagina heb teruggevonden. Ik dacht dat de universiteit mijn webrommel had weggehaald sinds ik was afgestuurd maar stiekem stond het nog hier.
Het is alweer jaren geleden dat ik deze webpagina heb geupdate, ik geloof dat ik in die tijd de ADND-avond nog "flauwe grapjes avond" noemde gezien de flauwheid van de verhaaltjes op de pagina. Hoe dan ook, ADND-avond bestaat nog steeds, hoewel we wel steeds minder het spelletje zelf spelen, en het is dan ook meer een gelegenheid voor mij om wijn te drinken, computer spelletjes te spelen en in het algemeen mijn vrienden van mijn studietijd nog te zien. Bah om over 'mijn studietijd' te praten voelt ook vreemd, voor mijn gevoel ben ik nog steeds student...
Nee ik ben een serieuze wetenschapper...
Echt waar!

litany of the usual things

Well I know I haven't blogged for a while but I haven't much interesting to tell you about my work as a physicist. Life has not been a rollercoaster of discovering new things of the workings of nature...
Instead I still work in the cleanroom a lot on finishing the "SCT-endcap". I also got more intimately aquanted with my computers recently as I spend much time behind them working on a small software project. But why would anyone want to read about me writing code and making plots?
Maybe it would be more interesting to tell that last weekend I went to Milan again to visit a friend. Claudine (my french housemate) also joined us that weekend and there was much rejoicing. (here  I would insert a picture of me and Claudine in Milan but I forgot to unload them of my digital camera)
In an effort to spend some time away from the products of our modern technology I started on a new painting which I promised Antonello (my Italian housemate) to finish before he finishes his thesis.
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Ah and for those of you that like to see pictures of physicists being silly please check out the pictures of our last halloween. I give a bad impression of showing all these pictures of me partying. I promise to work harder and discover a new particle soon...

SCT dinner

Yesterday the group bonding extravaganza continued in what was already the second sct-dinner! It was the turn of our boss this time who cooked an amazing dinner of Indian food. He told me that he didn't cook a proper meal in the last 8 years but I guess experience in cooking is not important when you have my sct-collague Caroline to help you! (and a good cookbook)

Selling physics to the public on saturday

Perhaps my last blog gives the idea that I use my spare time only for playing silly games. However last weekend I spent my saturday afternoon at NIKHEF selling science to the public.
Last saturday was the annual open day at the sciencepark (NIKHEF is one of several scientific institutes that together compose the sciencepark in Amsterdam)
The gates of the sciencepark hadn't even opened yet, but when I arrived already groups of people, families with children, were waiting outside. The open day was in fact very well visited and from 12 to 5 NIKHEF was filled with visitors. Amonst the visitors, me and many of my collagues were walking around and showing the visitors the experiments that we are working on, as well as many small experiments that showed some basic principles of physics.
I started my day at the spark chamber, which gives a live display of the cosmic muons that fly through us at every moment of the day. Later I was showing visitors "sillicon alley", the hallway from which the cleanrooms of the SCT-group can be reached. Telling about my daily work I always get quite enthousiastic but I hope I managed  to explain everything properly. At the end of the day I was demonstrating the relation between temperature and pressure to children by exploding cans, while next to me a collague was showing the effect of a vacuum pump on a variety of candies...
It was a long day and when I start talking about science I always forget to breathe. From time to time I had to take a break, like on this picture where I was visiting my housemate Claudine, who spend the day explaining her experiment, ANTARES.
Ah do you notice the fashionable orange t-shirts we are wearing? My fellow blogger and current director of NIKHEF was quite proud that he finally managed to convince the open day committee to have the NIKHEF t-shirt orange this year! I look forward to re-using the t-shirt on queensday!

SCT and ADND

SCT: Semi Conductor Tracker, my job is to help to build a part of this thing which will end up some day as a a part of the huge ATLAS detector. These 3 letters play a dominant role in my every day life I guess, my group is the "sct-group", with my fellow female collagues in the group we form the "sct-chicks" and tonight are boss has invited us for a "sct-dinner". Well I mention plenty of "sct" in this blog so let's switch to a different acronym.

ADND: Advanced Dungeons aNd Dragons, the pen and paper roleplaying game I play usually on sunday evening. Basically, one guy, the dungeonmaster, discribes the world we walk around in and the encounters we have, while me and two other friends play the roles of three brave heroes. For the last weeks the brave heroes have fought the evil denizens of the evil island, teleporting back from time to time to our favourite elven village for sleep and beer. Now this might sound a bit strange but here's a picture to help you understand how it looks when me and my friends are fighting an army of dark ninja's:

Well I am not sure if that helps anything nor do I understand what I was trying to say in the first place in this blog. Maybe I just wanted to show off the painting skills of my fellow ADND-players. So in that case I better show a pictures of the dark elf figures which they recently painted:

Well ok, next blog, more science, less silly pictures!