• Question: What is the favourite thing that you have worked on?

    Asked by anon-217052 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison on 17 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      I’ve not been in my current job for very long so it’s hard to know what my favourite thing is/will be – I am currently working for the ATLAS detector at CERN to see what happens when particles of light smash together at really high energies and produce particles called W bosons. I am looking to see if we can find new physics that makes this process more likely to happen (it is normally very rare). This might be through new particles getting involved in the interaction that we haven’t discovered yet. All of this is really cool but I have not been doing it for very long!
      .
      I used to work in medical physics during my degree and helped to model a proton therapy beam which is used to treat cancer. This was very rewarding work as it directly helped people!

    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      The Higgs boson discovery was fabulous, but my favourite thing was making the first precise measurement of the mass of the top quark way back in 1997-1998, working with just a few colleagues at Fermilab. We got 174 +/- 6 GeV, which is to be compared with the most recent measurement of 173 +/- 0.4 GeV.

    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 18 Jun 2019:

      It’s probably what I am trying to do now which is writing software playing with what happens to particles during the first second after the Big Bang. But I have an unusual path. I would have like to do research but things did not work out that way. So I managed to come back little by little to get close to what I like. I suppose the lesson is that, if you really hang on, things can eventually go the right way. Nevertheless, there are together things I have made that I really like. Things like fluid dynamics are fun. By doing a bit of maths and lots of programming, you can predict how water is going to splash on an obstacle. Another thing I liked was genetics. Using large computers you can find patterns in DNA sequences to explain where certain diseases come from for example.

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