Greetings and best wishes for a new year! Beta Beat is finally back, after a rather lengthy hiatus. Here's a taste of what's kept me from posting:
In October I attended two back-to-back conferences. The first was regarding Electron Cloud (one of the main areas of research at my lab, and something I will come back to) at Cornell, my home university. The second was in Geneva, Switzerland, and was the first joint conference between the research groups for the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact LInear Collider (CLIC), a counter-proposal for a linear collider from CERN. You can count on an article in the near future about CLIC and what makes it so different from the ILC.
Immediately following the CLIC/ILC workshop I was off for two weeks in the foothills of the Alps, at a little ski resort town by the name of Villars. Sadly I was not there for skiing, but rather for a two-week intensive linear collider training course. Considering all of my formal training in accelerators has been for circular machines, it was quite a different experience to learn about the design and operation of linear colliders.
After three weeks of Switzerland, I returned to Cornell only to jump into my "Advancement to Candidacy Exam", or ACE. The exam takes four weeks, and is comprised of three questions from your committee members regarding your field of research. In my case, my questions involved the Higgs Boson and particle physics at the ILC, the limits of storage ring x-ray light sources, and formally proposing my thesis. The responses to these questions came in the form of written reports and lengthy presentations to the committee, where they thoroughly grilled me. Luckily they believe I have what it takes to proceed with my degree, and I am now a PhD candidate.
After the exam finished in mid-December I jumped right into the final accelerator run for the first phase of the project I'm associated with, which ran right until Christmas Eve.
Now that I've had a couple weeks to get back on my feet again, I'm ready to get back into writing for the blog. Look for the next post sometime this week!
