Life and Physics

See also Chapter 3.6 of Smashing Physics.

Last week, on the day we got our first 7 TeV collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, quite by chance we also had the conference dinner of the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics groups. After years of financial body-blows to the fields (both principally funded by the STFC in the UK), the LHC news made it a pretty cheerful meeting in the circumstances.

The man who headed the UCL high energy physics group when I was appointed to the faculty, Tegid Jones, gave a wonderful after dinner speech. He went through the true and sometimes untold stories around the start up of several big experiments he has been involved in. These included a water-filled proton decay detector in a salt mine (IMB) which initially leaked (dissolving quite a lot of the mine and almost drowning the thesis of a future congressman), then achieved a 300m 490m siphon effect with a cesspit on the surface (bad for optical purity of the water). After the third filling, they failing to find proton decay. However, they did observe neutrinos from Supernova 1987a – still the only observation of neutrinos from outside the solar system, at least until maybe ANITA spots one. It also developed a lot of the techniques taken forward by the experiments which eventually found neutrino oscillations.

I’m lucky to have been involved in the start of two major particle physics colliders. I was a student on the ZEUS experiment, on the HERA collider in DESY, Hamburg, when it began operation.

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