CERN

Prana Karthikesu, U6th Student

Before arriving at CERN I had a lot of expectations about what it would be like. I imagined towering, futuristic buildings, scientists in white lab coats and everything looking a little like a set from Star Trek!

On the first day I met Dr Barney and the other interns from Zurich. The canteen at CERN felt more like a Spanish bar! It was full of physicists wearing t-shirts, Bermuda shorts and sandals, chatting in French and English. I even saw a 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Physics who was responsible for predicting the existence of 3 families of quarks in nature. I was also able to meet the former director general Rolf Heuer, a German physicist who won the Nature’s 10 award.

Over the course of the week, Dr Barney took us on the 15-minute car ride to the site of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, which is 100 metres underground and located over the border in France. On arrival we met the safety coordinator who gave us clearance. We then passed through the control room, which was dormant as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was currently turned off and all the experimental physicists were doing maintenance operations on the CMS. We then passed through an iris scanning machine in order to proceed to the elevator shaft.

My job was to test each high voltage power supply by connecting it to the main hardware in the underground service cavern (USC). I used some software called gecko to monitor the current and voltage outputs to see if they were constant for each of 5288 silicon detectors making up the preshower detector. At the end of the test, David told me that my data would actually be used by CMS.

This experience completely changed my life. It felt amazing collaborating with physicists on an international scale. The energy and passion the physicists had at CERN has motivated me to work harder. I felt proud by the end of the week to able to confidently conduct various test on the preshower detector.