How did you decide to apply for the summer student programme?

I heard about the summer student programme at CERN already some years ago and I also saw a poster in my home university in Erlangen. From October '11 to June '12 I was at Imperial College in London as an ERASMUS student. There they did not only remind us of the programme but also my supervisor in a project on LHCb data analysis encouraged me to apply for the CERN summer school. Since I haven't been to CERN before, passing the summer there with lots of fellow summer students from all over the world seemed to be a great opportunity.

Tell us a few words about your project.

Since at Imperial I had already got a little bit of insight in the work that needs to be done to get from a data file containing the candidate events you want to analyse to an analysis result, I was interested to go one step back and see how you get from the output of your detector to the data file analysts can take as an input. That's why I applied for projects on "Online Monitoring" and "Trigger".

Now you may ask: "Wait, since there is no new data taken this year during the first long shutdown of the LHC, is there a lot of work to do on these topics?" -- Yes, there is! Because currently these components are restructured and improved for the new run next year.

The project I finally got is to get the detector alignment of LHCb into the online monitoring. The plan is to have an "alarm-bell" to instantly become aware of and account for unforeseen changes in the alignment of the detector during data taking. Of course you can not go down to the pit and push the mis-aligned part of the LHCb detector back in place by fractions of a millimetre. Therefore all the alignment is accounted for in the tracking software, that combines the numerous hits in the detector to form tracks. Checking the alignment already online (with online I mean before data is written to disk) can help improving the quality of the data that is selected to be stored on disk. My project is purely software based, and at the beginning of my time at CERN it took quite a while to see how all the software packages work and what they do.

Is your experience so far close to what you were expecting?

I expected CERN to be very international, and yes it is! You meet so many people coming from all over the world, all successfully working together. The visits of the computing centre, LHCb and CMS were really good to become aware of the dimensions of present particle physics experiments. Especially CMS was very handsome to look at. And visits of ATLAS, the Linac and the Antiparticle Decelerator are still to come. I am also looking forward to a workshop where we'll be measuring the radiation damage on silicon sensors.

Did you have time to travel around CERN? 

Of course, there is more than work when you are a summer student at CERN. During weekends a lot of places wait to be discovered around Geneva with the many new friends you made at CERN. I most enjoyed hiking in the Jura, visiting music festivals around Geneva and going to the Rhône and Lac Leman for swimming. But also just sitting in front of the restaurant with your fellow students is a great time I will certainly remember.