My day as a CERN employee

Last Friday 11th march, I was given the opportunity to have an experience as a physicist. The UB offered a course about particles physics which was based on the comprehension of the modern experimental physics. 

As I’ve said, I was accepted and I experienced how it felt to be a physicist for one day. We arrived there at 9:30AM and we made the accreditation. They gave us some tech stuff for the masterclass. At 10:00AM, the first speech began with the ICC (Institut de Ciències del Cosmos) headmaster, Lluís Garrido, who introduced us the standard model for this area of physics. We were also given some information about new discoveries like gravitational waves and gravitational lens. This first speech was the basement of the day, where we learned what would let us follow the rest of the day.  Then, after breakfast at 11:40AM, we had another speech about technical aspects of the Large Hadron Collider which was essential to understand and making the interpretation of the results we would analyse later. The next speech was performed by the headmaster of the degree, Atilà Erms, who encouraged all of us to study physics one day. I was convinced before and I’m even more now. I will do all that is in my hands for becoming a physicist!

We had a lunch break where I met a lot of people who were as freak as I am, I never expected that all those amazing people would exist in the same dimension I do! (Quantum mechanics joke, as you see so freak. That people knew what I am talking about).

In the afternoon Vicente Rives, a future doctor on particle physics, explained us what we had to do, and we began working. The hypothesis was that a D0 boson disintegrates itself in a pi+ and a k- one, so we had to look for it. And so we did! We calculated the average mass of the particles and the guy that was working with me and I, found the exact value!

After that we compared the results with 4 universities of the rest of Europe. We had a conference with a CERN moderator and we were shown the insider parts of the LHCb.

This is the most amazing job I’ve ever done, hope to become a physicist soon!