Grindelwald and Dielectrics
This is the last Switzerland post, and it's a monster.
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Living at CERN is overwhelming. Every waking hour you are surrounded by physicists and physics, there is no escape.
Even the walls of the CERN hotel are lined with pictures of the LHC, CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, ALICE... etc.
Every square inch is high energy particle physics, and I love it.
But even so, it's nice to escape for a couple days.
Hiking in Grindelwald
On Friday, we said goodbye to Cadin and Faiz, and on Saturday, Gwen and I got on a train to Grindelwald.
It took 4.5 hours and 4 different trains to get to Grindelwald, Switzerland.
We tried pretty hard to break some kind of law to have committed crimes of Grindelwald, but this is the best we could come up with...
Grindelwald has a population of only 3,800 people.
But there are a lot of tourists.
To see the sights without hordes of people around, you need to go somewhere that requires work to get to.
Because most people aren't willing to put in the effort.
Except for the Swiss grandmas. My goodness, if you see a Swiss grandma coming up the trail behind you, you know you're about to get passed.
This mountain is about 13,000 feet above sea level, and it's right next to the Jungfrau train station, which is the highest one in all of Europe.
The hike is supposed to start up high at Eigergletscher, and go down to Alpiglen. We were going to try to do it backwards, because we like to make things more difficult.
But I accidentally bought a ticket to Eigergletcher instead of Alpiglen, so we went downhill, which was maybe not a bad thing.
Since we arrived in the afternoon, we only had time for a relatively short hike.
But there were still cows.
The Swiss cows are exactly like the Swiss people.
really ugly.
Just kidding. They're beautiful and friendly.
She did that pose in every picture I swear.
Gwen made fun of me for this:
But she's the one who got radiation burned this weekend.
Difficulty : Difficulty
I couldn't have said it any better myself. Sunday was the big hike.
Hike #2 started out far away from Grindelwald in a place called Grosse Scheidegg.
I have no idea what that means.
On the way to the hike people were flying these model planes that I could have watched for hours.
But we had a mountain to defeat.
The trail took us right through a tiny Swiss farm, with cows, pigs, sheep, everything.
The hike was overflowing with cows.
This one was so friendly.
And soft!!! Look at that fur.
This one was not friendly ⇩.
I don't know how to tell if they're friendly other than to go up and try to pet them, so that's what I did.
She tried to horn me! Rude!
We were wondering what the cows do when it's winter and this place is covered in 20 feet of snow.
And the answer is that they run the ski resort.
It's a tight race for who loves Switzerland the most, but there's no doubt that Gwen takes first place.
We counted how many times I changed my camera lens, and how many times she said "when I come back here for the rest of my life I'm going to do ______."
And we both lost count.
As we went farther up, the path became less and less trail and more and more like an easter egg hunt for these red and white markers.
Usually there were at least two within sight, but sometimes not.
Eventually we got to snow.
I was really excited about the snow. I tried to make a snow angel.
It's quite difficult on the side of a mountain.
This made me want to ski.
"If you follow the yellow arrows, you will find your way" says the Jungfrau hiking website.
This ⇩ was the hardest part. It was deceptively tall, and at that point we were beginning to feel the altitude.
But we made it up.
Even when it looks brown, if you zoom in close enough, there is green there too.
We met some people from Slovenia who had a dog.
It's so interesting how sensitive the terrain is to altitude changes. One minute it's grassy and there are streams everywhere, then suddenly it's so dry and barren that you could be in a desert.
From the top we could see the bluest lake I've ever seen. It turns out the color is from a really fine sediment called glacial flour, not from the lack of air like I thought.
We found three lakes on this hike, but I had to jump into lake #1 because I'm impatient.
This was not water. This was melted ice. So. Cold. Burr.
Lake #2 kindly asked to not be photographed, so we'll have to skip that one.
Every time I go somewhere in Switzerland I think my god, now THIS must be the most beautiful place I've ever seen.
Every single time (except Bern, sorry Bern).
Lake #3 was the biggest, and it had cows.
Time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock.
Except that the last cable car would leave at 6:30, and we didn't want to walk 2.5 more hours back to Grindelwald, nor sleep in the mountains.
Do you see it?
After 7 hours, 10 miles, and a lot of up, it was nice to parachute back into town via cable car.
Science:
On Thursday, Faiz took me to the CLEAR test beam facility, which is where he has been working since January. At CLEAR they do research and development of technology for future accelerators. I finally got to see those legendary BPMs.
I appreciate this place more and more every day.
And I have more pictures from the SPS tunnel.
Except for the beam dump, this area ⇧ is the most radioactive area in the SPS. It's the extraction point that goes to fixed target experiments in the north area of Prévessin.
I've been helping with S-parameter measurements of the vacuum ports (you would not believe how many vacuum ports there are) and the beam position monitors.
It's quite tedious, but I still really enjoy going down there.
I tried to get a picture of myself crouched down under a dipole, but instead I just hit my head and it turned out blurry.
I guess that's why we need the helmets.
This is the source of the electromagnetic field inside the 200 MHz cavities. The source is above ground, and the field travels through a coax waveguide down to the tunnel. The low pass filter that I have been working on is attached to this line (orange).
I've been doing a lot of different simulations to make sure this thing doesn't destroy the LHC. We need to be sure that this shape can handle the amount of power that is passing by it.
And that it isn't causing significant losses.
And apparently the shape we had before is too large to fit in the tunnel, so I've been working on reducing it's size by using dielectrics instead of vacuum. This is the original vacuum stub ⇩.
And this is the new dielectric stub ⇩.
They do the same thing, but the dielectric stub is way smaller.
With only two more days left in Switzerland, I'm happy, sad, and nowhere in between when I think about leaving, but luckily there are only good things ahead.
