Introduction

Greetings! You've found my PSI webpage. This site is intended to be a place for me to keep my friends and family in the US informed about what I'm doing in Switzerland.

Pictures

NEW! Pictures for this run can be found at http://www.npl.uiuc.edu/exp/mulan/photos/fall2003/ .

Early Days

Things are a little different over here. Customs was the easiest thing in the world. The passport officer just glanced at my passport and said thank you, without even stamping it or anything. Then customs was divided into two lines. If you had something to declare, you had to talk to the official, but if you had nothing to declare, you just walk right on through. The train station was right in the airport, and the train ride was much smoother than the one I took up from Champaign.

Shopping is a little different too. You have to buy your own plastic grocery bags, and there are no scales at the register, so you have to weigh and tag your own fruits and vegitables. Brendan got the sympathetic look from the checkout lady for being a foreigner, so she went back and tagged them for him, but I got a dirty look even though I didn't know either. Probably because I was right after him in line and by that time should have known better.

Swiss Gadgets

It seems that the Swiss enjoy having little gadgets incorporated into everything. Some of these are very good ideas, and some are not. One of my main concerns is that more gadgets means more opportunities for things to break. Anyhow, here are some examples.

Public Toilets:
Some public toilets are self cleaning. In the US, one might expect to find a sanitary seat cover for placing over public toilets. Here, upon flushing, a little arm slides out from the toilet tank, lowers to contact the seat, and the seat spins 360 deg. under this arm until it's scrubbed clean. This was so neat, I flushed twice the first time I saw it!

Windows:
Windows here have three states, one of which is closed, and two are open. The window handle is the standard 'L'-shaped bar pivoted at the thumb. When the handle points down, the window is locked. When the handle points horizontally, the window opens like a door, from the side. When the handle points up, the window opens part-way from the top, like an inverted garage-door. Most of the windows I see are opened from the top, which is useful in the rainy season. I imagine in the summer, the windows are more commonly opened all the way from the side.
Note: The Swiss do not have screens on their windows or their patio doors. This means bugs come in a lot.

Keys:
Doors with keys lock/unlock with the key from both sides. Unfortunately, this may mean that if you lose your key, you will be unable to leave the room you're currently in. Our apartment works on the same principle. Obviously, this would not fly in the US, since this violates fire codes. In fact, I think it's a versy foolish idea. I believe one should always be able to leave any building without a key, even if you needed one to enter.
The keys themselves are different from US keys. Whereas we have keys with teeth, here the keys are straight. Instead of teeth, they have dimples along the shaft which align with some mechanism inside the lock. I find this interesting and worth further study.

PSI

You can find the main PSI webpage at www.psi.ch/index_e.html. This facility has a proton accelerator, which provides protons for several targets. Two of these targets produce muons and pions (the medium and heavy cousins of the electron and positron). This beam also powers a neutron source and a light source, which you can read more about on the webpage. Here and here is a diagram of the beamline. We use the piE3 beamline, which takes a vertical step above the horizontal beamline, which is why two pictures are necessary to describe it. I'll tell you more about the muLan experiment when I have time. For now, I'll simply say that I worked a lot on the high voltage, and soon I'll be moving into the data aquisition.

Radiation Control:
Radiation protocol is pretty tight here, but also very safe. Every day I grab my radiation badge before heading into the experiment hall. Our experiment is in a level 1 zone (the levels range (0-5). Level zero areas are controlled, but there's nothing you can't do there. Level 1 areas forbid eating, drinking and smoking, and whenever you leave them you have to stick your hands in a little box and stand on a platform and wait until it detects your hands and feet aren't contaminated. I'm not worried though, since you can enter up to a level 3 area without protective clothing, and the beam from various experiments is too low energy to leave the experiment anyway. There are all sorts of protocols involving entering your experiment, if you fail any of which they lock down the beam and yell at you. Most of the time we're in a little wooden room behind a concrete wall, well away from any danger.

Thanks!

Thanks for stopping by. I'll add more updates later, and include pictures when I can.