What's it like doing a PhD at CERN?

thank you to brilliant for sponsoring a section of this video get smarter at maths and physics free solving problems at brilliant org slash Simon Clark we have one of those access to lots of people follow this YouTube channel because of the vlogs I made during my PhD in atmospheric physics at the University of Exeter unfortunately however I had to graduate at some point and that necessarily meant the end of my videos showing what doing a PhD was like however there are lots of people out there doing interesting PhD projects and so in this video series I'm spending a few days with a new researcher each episode showing you what their life is like learning a bit about them and learning about the topic of their thesis in this episode I'm at the European Organization for Nuclear Research also known as CERN to talk to a researcher who's just starting out in her PhD researching and producing antimatter hello welcome to CERN first impressions on being here it's very beautiful there are mountains sort of you know reading it we were in Switzerland for goodness sake you could argue that this is like the global home of physics it's like the poster child for all physics research and feels like any University campus science kind of area it's a mix of buildings different ages a bunch of pipe sticking out some of them all the exciting starts happening underground or in mines all of the internal roads are named after physicist oh so that's fun also it's quite a big site there's actually an app you can download to help you navigate around when I got here yesterday I immediately got lost I had arrived the previous day to meet a whole bunch of PhD students taking part in the early careers conference entrapped ions this was an academic conference hosted at CERN aimed at giving young scientists in their PhD or their early postdoctoral work a chance to network and present their research as were the other academic conferences this took place via presenting posters with some incredible titles and also through giving talks I was invited to give the final talk at the conference on effective digital science communication ok I seem to spot one for another I didn't know where I was outside and I found the building it's a big I didn't want first to go in the building however after navigating the labyrinth of corridors I was able to find a lecture theatre and give my talk I think that went well with this done I was then on my way to the antimatter Factory yes that is literally on the side of the building to talk to PhD students Yoanna pesckow what researchers came from all over the world to attend the conference Yoanna suitcase by Asha is in the first year of doing her PhD actually at CERN okay I guess the first thing is what drew you to this particular research project like why this and none of the other stuff that's going on the CERN because I'm team others this may well be true but earlier I asked Asha why she had ended up in physics at all and her answer was rather unique so before we go any further with her research I want to showcase her reason for studying physics in the first place whenever I was teenager I thought like wow CERN is cool I would like to work at CERN but I could for a little knowledge about that and in general like I don't know if should I talk my story why I went into physics I think it's pretty funny but I don't know that should go in public because essentially I had such a terrible physics teacher in my high school that I had to put so much backward to learn physics that I spent so much time breathing and I realized wow it's funny it's not only like a pendulum and you calculate frequency it's a lot of funny stuff for very long time I just believed interesting thing is chemistry because like how atoms molecules are built and physics is just as boring thing like calculating I don't know the velocity on the slow blah blah blah blah and then I discovered this interesting part in chemistry was actually physics okay so with that bit of background which incidentally is completely correct after doing an internship at CERN Asha started her PhD in antimatter antimatter is essentially like mother different except for accent electrons okay yeah so like each particle should have corresponding antiparticle and the difference between them will be charged so whenever we have electron with negative charge some mass etcetera there should be some anti electron which is called positron that would happen we expect would have exactly the same features with this different that it has opposite charge that it would have the same amount of charge just opposite sign so you expect it to interact with gravity with electromagnetic force and exactly so we have standard model that expects that anti particles will behave the same way as matter particles but we don't know we are experimentalist so like even though there are many models people have different opinions but no one check it so far and this is this is our our work to measure antimatter system and comparative matter so we're in the antimatter Factory behind us I already had a look down somebody hardware it's kind of lots of experiments connected together right to actually make your stuff so there's this helpful diagram which what we're going to go through so how do we take our anti products we use protons Antti process so we are using protons from the very first early stage of acceleration so we have protein cyclotron like one of first accelerators later those problems would go to LHC and will investigate Higgs bosons other interesting stuff so the person's equation is it's a smaller acceleration small accelerator is based on this campus some of those protons are used for different experiments for us in antiproton community also for Nuclear Research in isold and many other smaller projects we take those protons it has high enough energy that whenever we collided with a target you can see the target is like it was pointed out so there is a strong interaction here right the proton beam is a target iridium target and this interaction produces antiprotons semantic products and dance antiprotons are recaptured and guided to our antique proton pack trip we call it an throttle decelerator so this is the hole that we are in we are standing here and we are the only decelerator at CERN we actually won't go to slower and slower energies because if we want trap antiprotons if you want two measurements we need to have them so lower so we have accelerator this is like essentially like accelerator but it works in other direction it slows down so we'll have a cycle of antiproton bound you know you'll undergo many cooling processes whenever we talk about energy we also acetate doing a temperature so whenever I say cooling it means decreasing energy this is our physicists jargon so will cool down the beam and then whenever the beam is it has low enough energy we can inject it into experiments which are located in the center of the ring so the protons have gone from the proton synchrotron is a massive we know ring it's it's it's a big ring then it's coming everything is a tiny bit and then you you know you produce antiprotons they come into a smaller ring and then cool them down further and then this ring down here what is this is the Elena experiment that would be next deceleration stage so even to go lower and lower in energy so whenever beam will undergo the cycle in AD or we inject it to Elena so make the be more compact with higher intensity so this part slows down little bit but mainly it improves the beam I mean these are lots of different experiments they're connected together how many people are working and doing research I don't know exact numbers right because we have few experiments here's my experiment alpha there is a trap experiment we also have edges Asakusa and there is also life experiment based it could be hundreds of people that works on this overall yeah I think maybe that is not as clear is that experiments are independent so quite often we work on the same problem but our approaches are completely different so free groups try to investigate gravity but each approach is different and that's how it should be you want results but using different techniques and this is also of course a little bit of competition right because if you are the only person who does this thing who would motivate you to do it as I shall already mentioned she is part of the Alpha experiment which isn't just studying antiprotons instead she's looking at antiparticle system called anti hydrogen so antihydrogen is a system of positron and antiproton bounded so it's an is an aunty whole atom yeah it's the simplest anti atom and so then we believe like if the standard model is correct then this should have exactly the same properties as hydrogen hydrogen is the best understood system so it's really good to investigate it measure measure things that we can measure and that's why other field that we're doing is spectroscopy what the spectroscopy is it sounds really enigmatical someone who is a physicist let's bring it to normal life right we have a system of two particles like in our case is antihydrogen with antiproton and positron and these two particles are like a couple right usually you have your daily lives your daily problems and you have like your ground state right but at some point something happens like there is some even some excitation let's say you know they go for days so then we have like some external factor that excites this couple and that thing that excites an atom is photon we add energy right so we add photon that causes the electron or anti-electron to excite so being in higher energy level and then this cannot last forever right even if we went for a holiday or went for a nice day still we come back to work normal life we the excite right so we call back to our ground state we lose the energy and this is what we investigate this is the most depressing explanation of spectroscopy we investigate if our energy levels on the hydrogen the same as in terms of hydrogen so the thing that we measure is if the difference in energy between ground state and excited said is exactly the same because that's spectrum those energy levels are different unique for each atom we can distinguish atom by energies energy is represented by spectrum each color represents a different energy red is less blue is more yeah so this is spectroscopy in visible range these are actually the frequencies of light that we can see it's actual life but of course we can go beyond that we can go to ultraviolet we can go to infrared spectrum of atoms is wider than only visible but this is like nice to imagine to understand that whenever we have normal visible light because you know there are a lot of PhDs we know each other and like we meet each other on conferences we meet each other every day here so like the community we like this bit of competition just like farming but still this is a great small community that's interesting definitely I think it's different than at the University because certain is different right you don't have classes you don't have like this really academic feeling that you're just a student and you have thousands of professors around there are many students here and I think this is different from universities whenever you go to restaurant here you just see mostly exactly you cannot escape from CERN because essentially like it's possible to not leave Stern at all because there is hotel here right there are restaurant so you can eat your breakfast when you are at work then you go for lunch you come back to work you stay until dinner and then you go for dinner so either you come back to work or you can stay for years right so if you like for if you are for short time at CERN you will be even living in the hotel so then it's possible that they just don't leave CERN at all for some reason this place here is like kind of I don't know maybe there's not much entertainment outside so people will hang around restaurant here anyway and if that's tricking you into doing more work yeah I think I think it works like that but I think a good point is there's many there many students the resort there are there this is I can speak polish I hope you'll forgive the indulgence but this being such a lovely morning it's my final day here and there are mountains all around and continuing my tradition of every time I visit somewhere new I'd like to get my my feet on the ground I go for a run I'm going to go and run it's a France and back the sight is so big that technically I could do this without ever actually leaving it but I I'm gonna go out the gate you know properly I cannot stress them off I dunno if there's anywhere else on earth and you can just say oh yeah keep going straight on Albert Einstein wrote Jetport you can't miss the border there you go that's the border don't think anyone's Manning it me secreting my passport on my person was not worth it and now I'm in France that's easy 9 France is pretty it feels like I'm running on the stairway to heaven taking a quick breather that's top of the hill over the hill not quite far away but running but sir now just in front of me my right side is the shrubbery what on the last day of the conference the researchers and I got a seriously cool opportunity to visit some of the experiments that make up the Large Hadron Collider or LHC the huge particle accelerator that runs underneath Sun and 27 kilometers long is the largest most powerful machine in the world so we're about to go underground by about 100 metres take a look at the Large Hadron Collider where the CMS experiment I cannot keep big fat grid off my face we're so far underground here that when we came down in the lift my ears pop as the atmospheric pressure is much much higher down here exponential functions I wasn't expecting quite how loud it is down here and obviously the big experiment and it's an account a cavern so you know it's self-contained but it's bloody loud in here this thing is MN an immensely complex it's not just one big block of detectors loads of complex electronics that go on inside it let alone the data analysis that happens afterwards the actual thing itself is super complicated can you tell I'm not a fast couple with this little fun fact if you see people taking selfies with the beam and having come to CMS they haven't actually seen the beam pipe they're taken with this very convincing poster backdrop hurting ones which I per my social media it's bizarrely convincing until you see the edges being here in the experiment and we're currently in one of the counting rooms which is where the recipe beside if an event that happens if the detector is interesting or not it kind of feels like you're in the belly of a massive mechanical electronic beast you know almost like Jonah and the belly of a whale like you know this is you're just surrounded on all sides by concrete and metal and electronics and the fuels yeah kind of alive the scale is just immense there was in foreign later in the day we also visited the LHCb experiments and we were joined by Asha who what working at CERN hadn't seen this experiment before so we're currently underground at the LHC be experiment this is an LHC be behind me this is Delfy which is an old experiment that's just a base clears like a museum piece we went to how to look at the LHC be detector which is looking for Clark composites which are formed from the bottom quark which is the second heaviest quark and another quark and they're doing that to investigate the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe there's basically this CP symmetry violation and so all of this gear thing of this level of technology behind is probing the most fundamental building blocks that we are currently aware of the tiniest possible thing that can only be accessed on but its immense scale so Asha obviously CERN is huge and you know you you work on a completely different experiment this is your first time down do you still get a kick out of seeing the size of these experiments it's still like or inspiring I don't feel it's as huge as if alright like I've been in many times underground in different experiment and it's like I rather focus on the technical parts like let's say oh they have really nicely padded cables or like I really love in Atlas because I don't know how is it called but essentially you have cables or some trade that goes out so whenever you run an experiment any talk about cables and this is so cool I would love it that we need to take out some part of equipment we can just rolled out that was amazing I think you've been here too long I think you're turning into an engineer six hours later so we just came down this this is completely unmarked dark stairway I thought I was going to be brought down here to be murdered so what was this useful was this was there a like a Collider or or an accelerator that went down here or is this just service tiles I need to disappoint you I'm guessing it's only serviced out so people keep here like you know broom sweeping equipment essentially like students who don't finish their theses on time we just leave my food we love their bodies I know for a second that we were gonna have like the secret you know collider that's underneath CERN that nobody knows about you're telling me this is a big broom cupboard it looks safe you I've got it's like it's like The Return of the Jedi when they're flying into the Death Star okay this displays all around so what's found that restaurant one I'll go on then I do need dinner oh now you tell me this time yeah we have one of those XK them I'm the world oh there's like a little hero yeah so we should have carried on TURN RIGHT that Junction I thought these kind of tunnels only happen in books I didn't think they actually exist just a basement what are you hoping your PhD project is gonna be sorry I asked the question you should never ask yeah okay so I am working in parts of experiment which focus on improving our hydrogen trapping right so we won't do it by decreasing temperature of positrons we can decrease temperature of positrons by mixing it with something holder and this Condor thing can be at home atom of beryllium atoms of beryllium that have been laser cooled because we have this feature that interaction between atoms and laser if there's done in a proper way they can decrease temperature of Berlin so this is work I've been doing for last year together with my colleagues and other ideas other ideas is to use those beryllium atoms for magnetometry so for us a really really important thing is what is the magnetic field Network a really really precise measurement we need to know it to distinguish effects of gravity from effects from magnetic field so my work will focus on finding the technique developed schemes how we could use those volume items we already have in our apparatus to characterize magnetic field as an atomic probe I'm not trying to say this to like put you down but basically you are in a tiny tiny way improving so you are improving with the science that is done here not just like coming in and doing an experiment already exists you're actually pushing like knowledge that's what a PhD is it's like you know it's a yes it's really small but it's like you're pushing knowledge forward and you're still doing it even at certain you don't have to be so modest Asha was a wonderful example of someone who was extremely capable motivated and personable and yet while still being early in her PhD was definitely already feeling the strain of academia doing a PhD anywhere isn't easy and doing one in a nearly closed intense environment like CERN seemed even more like a bubble I really hope that this year she's able to move on with her project and do some science which is seriously cool but much as CERN is the global home of physics and the only place in the world to produce antimatter like this I don't envy her position there is a lot of hard hard work to be done but I know that she is the right person to do it if he found the topic of antimatter super interesting and Mike wouldn't you then maybe you'd like to research it yourself one day in which case an essential piece of your tool kit would be quantum mechanics after all the existence of antimatter was only postulated by my boy Paul Dirac when he found the quantum equation describing the electron had two solutions one being the electron and the other being the positron anybody can get to grips with quantum mechanics with brilliance expertly written course on the subject which will allow you to learn by doing by solving problems and taking part in interactive quizzes brilliant also has courses on other areas of modern physics such as relativity and quantum computing but also chemistry maths and computer science and is generally a phenomenal educational resource has daily problems multi-platform support the dedicated community and inbuilt wiki you couldn't ask for anything more from an educational resource perfect for people at school high school and particularly if you're interested in studying science at university get smarter under your own steam with brilliant at the link below and if you use the promo code Simon Clarke then you can get 20% off and support this series thank you for watching the video and thank you of course to Asher for being so incredibly generous with her time for showing me around CERN and explaining her research to me and to you guys so thank you to her I had a fantastic time at CERN it was honestly a dream come true to visit to see the LHC and to even give a talk so I must also say thank you to dr. April Cridland who organized the conference and invited me to speak and to the University of Swansea who covered my travel if you enjoy this series and would like to see more videos like this one and pop the video alike and let me know in the comments what you thought what you liked and what you didn't like about this video and if you are a PhD student with an interesting story to tell in a video like this one then let me know all the contacts information is available on my website thank you again for watching and I will see you in the next one now wash your hands

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 261,659

Keywords: CERN, physics, antimatter, anti-matter, anti-hydrogen, antihydrogen, anti-protons, antiprotons, LHC, large hadron collider, large hardon collider, joanna peszka, drsimonclark, dr simon clark, simonoxphys, simonoxfphys, PhD, DPhil, grad school, PhD thesis

Id: Tw1Ef-dzU4w

Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020