As I mentioned in my last post, this week I’m at a workshop discussing the development of semiconductor devices that can survive in the very heart of experiments on the LHC (and beyond!). This collaboration is call RD50 and is, unimaginatively, the 50th research and development group at CERN.
This workshop meets twice a year; once at CERN in the winter and once at an institute of one of the members of the collaboration in the summer. This time, we’re at the University of Turino in Italy. It’s a nice chance for the institutes to host their colleagues and show off their facilities and local culture. For students and post-docs (like me), who don’t have permanent jobs in science yet, this is a nice opportunity to experience a difference lab or university, and build contacts, so it can help a lot when having to decide on where to apply for a job next.
Since I had been at CERN for a test beam before leaving for the workshop, I took the train to Turino from Geneva. This route has a beautiful section which passes Lake Geneva between Montreux and Lausanne. On the lake is Château de Chillon, an island castle which started out as Roman outpost and was expanded over time (isn’t Wikipedia great!). I managed to snap a photo of it as we passed by:
If you’d like to check out the beautiful scenery on the train journey, you can watch the video I recorded, below:
The workshop, as always, led to many useful discussions. I presented results from a prototype pixel device that I had been testing to understand why other devices we have became more damaged than expected. People in other labs had been seeing similar behaviour, so because of our discussions we can more quickly understand why it’s happening. Overall, a very fruitful and enjoyable workshop.
Dr Clara Nellist 