As I am sure everyone is well aware by now, UCL won a share of an enormous prize yesterday1. After half a century of valiant defeat and occasional failure to turn up, football really is coming home. We won the annual Bubble Chamber Football tournament (with a bit of help from some nuclear physics colleagues from Surrey and Liverpool).
The Bubble Chamber tournament is so called because it has its origins in the groups working on bubble chamber experiments in the 1970s. UCL was a founding member of the tournament but has never won in once since it started in 1975. Until now!! There is a history here, which only goes up to 1996, making the web page itself something of an ancient artefact.
All particle physics groups in the UK are now invited to play, whether or not they work on bubble chamber experiments. This is a good thing, because no one works on bubble chamber experiments anymore2. The tournament is generally held the day before the annual IoP High Energy and Astroparticle Physics conference , which starts today (I am about to get the train to Cambridge – thanks to them for hosting, and I wish I’d gone for the football too now).
This annual meeting is generally a good coming-together where senior PhD students present their work, we have some great plenary talks, prizes are awarded (including the presentation of the Bubble Chamber trophy, Hurrah!) and there is an STFC Town meeting. The grim funding situation at STFC has led to some damaging impacts and uncertainty, and the debate about the future of CERN and European Particle Physics is heating up. All this in a very uncertain international environment, so it is unlikely to all be sweetness-and-light. But there will be lots of good physics (including our result being presented today for example), and the award of this prize is something to look forward to.
The victorious captain (Will Quinn) will be bringing the cup back to UCL on Thursday. I will try to get some pictures.
- Also the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics, shared by those of us on ATLAS. ↩︎
- I fully expect to be corrected on this by angry bubblers. I apologise in advance. ↩︎
Life and Physics 
I must challenge your assertion (as an ancient bubble chamber person – HOBC the HOlographic Bubble Chamber) that no one uses them anymore. They do in the Dark Matter world! See PICO and SIMPLE for example.
I knew it…
I didn’t want to disappoint you 🙂
Isn’t that Will back right in the photo?
of course it is… he told me he’d taken it so I didn’t check carefully enough. Caption fixed, thanks!