The Life of an ATLAS Physicist At CERN

An anonymous reader writes: Anyone with even a passing interest in the sciences must have wondered what it's like to work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN. What's it like working in the midst of such concentrated brain power? South African physicist Claire Lee, who works right on ATLAS – one of the two elements of the LHC project that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012 — explains what a day in the life of a CERN worker entails. She says, "My standard day is usually comprised of some mix of coding and attending meetings ... There are many different types of work one can do, since I am mostly on analysis this means coding, in C++ or Python — for example, to select a particular subset of events that I am interested in from the full set of data. This usually takes a couple of iterations, where we slim down the dataset at each step and calculate extra quantities we may want to use for our selections.

The amount of data we have is huge – petabytes of data per year stored around the world at various high performance computing centers and clusters. It’s impossible to have anything but the smallest subset available locally – hence the iterations – and so we use the LHC Computing Grid (a specialized worldwide computer network) to send our analysis code to where the data is, and the code runs at these different clusters worldwide (most often in a number of different places, for different datasets and depending on which clusters are the least busy at the time)."

Two things

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

1) Thank you for not using the term "Big Data" in the summary.

2) How do you permanently disable the crappy "Slashdot Deelz" ad that always appears now, even if you click its "Fuck Off" link?

Deelz?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 2) How do you permanently disable the crappy "Slashdot Deelz" ad that always appe2) How do you permanently disable the crappy

Just disable Javascript: I don't even know what you're talking about (and I probably don't know many other things I don't care about :-)

Re:Two things

[BlackPignouf]

We appreciate very much your interest in Slashdot.
To thank you for your insighful questions, we'd like to offer you some very interesting offers.
See https://deals.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] for more information.

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Re:

[AlabamaCajun]

Clever way of telling someone to eat spam and get a job! I would also suggest the OP drop the F-bombs from his post and /. might offer him the no ads option.

Re: please take the time to read this post

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably one of the best posts you've made, bennet.

Python + C++ = Python

[kafka0]

Why is the category Python while the researcher says that coding is done in both C++ and Python?

Re:

[AlabamaCajun]

Python ate the C.
I'm just happy to see C++ getting some up front attention in a highly visible project.

Python + ROOT "C++" = Python

[Roger W Moore]

Possibly because it often isn't coding in real C++. In ATLAS, and particle physics in general, we use this awful data analysis package called ROOT [root.cern.ch] which is about the worst example of C++ code you can possibly imagine (although it has significantly improved over the years). This package uses a C++ interpreter so that you can write C++ scripts. Sadly this interpreter cannot implement the full set of C++ so major bits of functionality are missing like virtual functions so it's hard to really call this C++.

U

Half Life!

[HnT]

Not really been wondering, we already got to witness it first-person in HalfLife! Just watch out when you notice any resonance cascade...

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Not really been wondering, we already got to witness it first-person in HalfLife! Just watch out when you notice any resonance cascade...

Well, we're gonna be fine as CERN has Gordon Freeman [escapistmagazine.com] working for them. He even got a crowbar [gizmodo.com]

Particle Fever

[Anonymous Coward]

A documentary was made recently:

"Particle Fever is a 2013 documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental physicists at CERN who run the experiments, as well as the theoretical physicists who attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC's results. The film begins in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the successful identification of the Higgs boson."

http://en.wikipedia.org

Re: Particle Fever

[Anonymous Coward]

It's on Netflix. Very enjoyable watch.

Accelerator data outsourced

[jovius]

Now anyone can help to analyze the data: http://www.higgshunters.org/ [higgshunters.org]

Re:

[rochrist]

Um...you're aware that apartheid ended 20 years ago, right?

Thank You for Not Insulting Our Intelligence

[Kunedog]

Thank you, /., for posting an article about a woman in STEM that (for once) contains no clickbaiting headline, libel about entire groups committing discrimination & misogyny & harassment, nor the usual thinly veiled, anvilicious feminist agenda. It really is refreshing.

Re:

[Kunedog]

Indeed I did consider just ignoring the editors' success, rather than highlighting their (more common) failures by calling attention to it. I nevertheless stand by my decision to congratulate them.

What it's really like ...

[tommeke100]

I had a friend who was a PhD student in Experimental Physics in the late 90s.
As part of his lab's obligations, he had to do some grunt/shift work at CERN about a week every month.
He said unless your life is Physics 24/7, it gets boring pretty quickly. A lot of people there only talk about physics, they have no other hobbies.
There was not much to do besides the Physics aspect.

This seems to have changed though judging from the article, there seems to be social clubs which is certainly an improvement. Still, she (the woman in the interview) says the turn-over rate is huge, people are send there at the beginning of their PhD and get back to their home labs after a while. Looks like that aspect hasn't changed but that's probably true for most University Labs in the world.

Re:

[claire_lee]

Hi! I'm Claire (from the interview) Well, I can't say what it was like in the 90's :) but there is a good social side now, especially among the younger people, though there is certainly the possibility of ending up in the "CERN bubble" where you do nothing but physics and never even go off site when visiting (there is a basic hotel and various cafeterias on site). As for the turnover rate, it gives you a very different perspective on making close friendships, since people can cycle in and out quite quickly

Re:

[tommeke100]

Cool, thanks for replying!
Yes this was also before the LHC on the smaller loop. The community is probably larger and more diverse now. Also, this is just hearsay of one person's account from a long time ago before the age of social media :)
Good luck with your research!

Re:

[claire_lee]

Thanks! :)