A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Pietro is the Summer Student from Padova this year. The few aficionados of this blog have probably ended in his own blog once, since I have a link to his page here (see on the right column). He has graduated with a thesis on CDF data analysis last year, and he will be doing his masters very soon - but probably on CMS.

Pietro will spend two months working at the use of Neural Networks for the improvement of the dijet mass resolution for pair of b-quark jets, a problem of some actuality these days in CDF, when we have a chance to discover a light Higgs boson before LHC does. Of course, we need much more data than what we currently have, but the machine is now working as it should, and if LHC continues to delay its startup at full energy and luminosity, it might just lose that train…

Tomorrow I will link here a post he promised to write in his site (and he’ll do the same), just for fun…

Today I had the pleasure to meet the italian Summer Students, a group of 14 excellent students from six italian universities (Udine, Padova, Trento, Pisa, Siena, Roma) who have come to Fermilab to work for two months at physics data analysis for the CDF experiment (the physics students) or engineering problems in the technical division (the engineers).

I am always curious to observe the fresh Summer Students. First, because I was one myself, back in 1992. Second, because many of them will become my colleagues soon. And third, because their reactions to the new world that I sometimes get a chance to introduce them to are always entertaining.

I remember one student, maybe eight or nine years ago, who was literally enthusiastic about everything he saw, from the signs on the highway to the color of dollar bills. It was such a treat to bring him downtown Chicago one evening… He even called his dad from a bar where a band was playing blues live, to let him listen to the music. That was fun.

Today we had an informal meeting to create the necessary connections between each student and his or her tutor - the person who will be responsible for their activities. At the end our big boss, Giorgio Bellettini, asked the students to make questions, since there just is too much to explain about the lab, the research activities, the physics we study. Since some of the students do not have a particle physics background, the question easily arose about what are elementary particles.

Giorgio was nice as always and he suggested that I give a brief seminar about the Standard Model and the structure of matter. So I gave this seminar “a’ la carte”, with attention to keeping things simple and to avoid boring my audience. I must say that the few physics posts I have written in 18 months of blogging here and in the old QD site helped me a lot in organizing a smooth flowing explanation with lots of easy examples and intuitive images, with just a white board and markers to visualize things.

I think I made a good job, given the sixty seconds I had to organize the lecture (while Giorgio was introducing me as “professor Dorigo” with his usual flattering remarks)… It was interesting to hear their questions, and attempt explanations that did not fish too deep in jargon or technical details.