Third day

On Thursday the first thing we did was split up the group. The schedule was divided by morning and afternoon and the groups had a parallel but contrasting programme. I first went to the Cryogenics lab and had an experiment with liquid nitrogen (-180 C!). We saw the effects it had on certain materials and found out how it was used in the LHC. After this we went to the oldest experiment at CERN. This is the ISOLDE experiment. Most particles of the LHC go here and the scientists look at isotopes and radioactive decays. They also look at medical applications of the research done at CERN. It was incredible to see how they deal with the immense dosis of radioactivity they dealt with in here and let us down into the lab. When we had done this we went to a workshop on the silicon detectors we had a lecture on yesterday. We got a detector and had to look at the trails it gave us on a computer and had to decide on which particles it could have been and how we can see its properties. This took about 1.5 hours after which we left for lunch. After lunch we had a 3 hour workshop on data analysis. This meant we got raw data from the LHC and (with some software) had to look at which particle they were and from which particle they could have come. This is also the method the scientist have used to discover the Higgs Boson. It was very educative but quite tedious after doing it 50 times. When this was done we went once again to the restaurant to have some time conversing with experts.