Go! Go! Go!

Go! Go! Go! The theme of the Nynke Dekker lab TwentyTwelve trip to Lausanne Switzerland! Other topics covered included how to survive a long day of lab visits on 5 hours sleep after a 20 hour day, drinking 101 (voluntary), a crash course in particle physics at CERN, hiking along Lake Geneva and hostel survival for beginners.

The trip began with my alarm going off at 04:00 on Wednesday morning. Get up, shower and Go! Go! Go! Have to be at the airport on time for the 06:55 flight to Geneva! Amazingly enough all 22 group members made it on time! (Well done David!). After some bank cards were swallowed by the ATM at Geneva airport, we were on our way to Lausanne by shuttle bus. The youth hostel where we stayed was well positioned close to the shores of the lake and surprisingly pleasant to stay with large rooms.

After a hot lunch, it was time to put your walking shoes on and Go! Go! Go! for a walk along Lake Geneva! We walked past the marina area, on past the Olympic museum (unfortunately closed at the moment for renovations) and on to Pully where the rain caught us and we stopped for a drink break at the nearest café. Some of us had hot chocolate and others decided it was time for a beer and a game of foosball. Rain delay over, some of us carried on walking to Lutry and others turned back to the hostel. The aim was the Lavaux vineyards but nobody made it that far!

Setting out for our walk! On the banks of Lake Geneva close to the hostel

The marina

Views of the lake and the shore

Coffee break from the rain!

Autumn colours

Those that walked on to Lutry caught the bus back into the city centre in time to watch the sunset over the valley from the Cathedral on a hill. Lausanne has a lovely old cobble-stoned pedestrian city centre. The main square, Place de la Palud, features the old town hall, the Fountain of Justice and of course many watch and Swiss army knife shops! Then it was time to meet up with the rest of the group for dinner. Two of the organising committee had arranged and made a pub-style quiz based on physics, Lausanne, CERN and other trip related trivia. Well done guys! It was super fun =)

Place de la Palud

The Fountain of Justice

A street in Lausanne city centre 

The Cathedral

Group dinner

Thursday morning was another early start and Go! Go! Go! for a full day of lab visits! We visited three biophysics groups at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne or EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). Wow, what a beautiful campus! Quite a large campus set just off the shores of Lake Geneva. The parts we saw gave the impression of a spacious campus with lots of green areas and space for students to relax. Outside the one main building were lots of tables and chairs but also table tennis tables where students were having a rally. As all universities, some new modern light-filled and airy buildings mixed in with much older buildings.

The schedule for the day was quite tight with the morning filled with talks given from both sides and an afternoon of lab visits after a tasty French bread and pastry inspired lunch. I am quite nerdy so it was quite fun and interesting exploring the campus and the labs, seeing how different labs do things compared to the TU and what I know from UCT.

The late afternoon arrived and it was Go! Go! Go! for some free time! Some people went back to the hostel to catch up on some lost sleep but I headed back into the city with Susanne, Laura and Jaap. We explored the city centre in search of good views and Swiss chocolate! We made it to the church with time to peek inside and enjoy the warmth from the late afternoon sun with great views of the city. Time for a coffee break before meeting up with the group for dinner in a beer-hall type pub restaurant. Some of the group moved on for more beers elsewhere but my weary body called for bed! Go! Go! Go! to the metro and don’t miss the bus!

The Cathedral

Inside the Cathedral

The view from the Cathedral

Soaking up the sunshine with Jaap, Laura and Susanne

Dinner at Les Brassiers in Lausanne. In the foreground, Laura and Xander on the left with Seamus of EPFL on the right.

Beer to order in 3 L or 5 L towers, any students dream!

Friday morning was time to leave Lausanne and head to CERN for a crash course in particle physics! Anybody can sign up for a 3 hour tour of CERN but they are so booked up at the moment that we couldn’t get a booking for our group. Fortunately Nynke has some connections through her work with FOM (Dutch foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) so we were still able to get a tour, and maybe even better, a personalised tour.

We spent 3 hours at CERN including lunch, some introductory talks about CERN and things we would see during our visit, the magnet hall, the main control centre, and the control centre for the detector ATLAS. I am not a physicist in any way never mind a particle physicist but I loved CERN! It is seriously an amazing feat of engineering and science. If you have any passion for science and you have an opportunity to visit CERN in Geneva, I highly recommend doing so!

Fun CERN facts:

-          CERN stands for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research

-          There are 20 European member states

-          The budget for 2012 is 1 billion Swiss Francs (CHF)

-          The contribution by each member states is determined by its GDP.

-          2,400 full time employees, 1,500 part-time employees and hosts 10 000 visiting scientists and engineers from 608 universities and 113 nationalities

-          Anybody from around the world can submit an application to perform an experiment at CERN

-          Of 11000 users, 25 have been from South Africa

-          CERN hosts Summer students every year and in 2012, 2 students were from South Africa and 7 from the Netherlands

-          6 South Africans have been in the teacher program

-          The World Wide Web was born at CERN

-          The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 27 km long and ~100 m underground around Geneva at the French-Swiss border area

-          There are 4 detectors along the LHC: ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb.

-          The proton beam travels around the tunnel 1100 times per second

-          There are over 1600 superconducting magnets in the tunnel

-          Each magnet weighs 30 tons

-          The magnets need to be kept at 1.9 k (-271.5 ºC) for which liquid helium is used

-          There are two proton beams running in parallel in the LHC

-          On a good day, a proton beam can last for up to 10 hours

-          Each beam is 350 mega joules or has the same amount of energy as 75 kg of TNT

-          Consequently the beam has to stay within a few mm in the tunnel otherwise it will cause serious damage if it escapes

-          The LHC will close in 2013 for 2 years for maintenance and improvements

-          CERN is considering building a linear collider

-          For more fun facts and information see www.cern.ch

I made it my mission to learn something at CERN and tried hard to understand what it is they do there. I am sure most of it escaped me but in a nutshell this is what I got:

There are 3 phases and loops in the system. A gas bottle pumps hydrogen ions into the first loop which are then deprotonated and accelerated to the speed of light (or was it the speed of sound?). The protons are moved into the second loop where they are given more energy. The two beams then move into the LHC where they are allowed to collide at given intervals. The protons are packaged in bunches of 1.1 x10¹¹ per bundle and 2808 bunches per beam. When the protons collide into each other they form new particles of different weights and energies. Some of these have been described before but it is the ones that have not been described before that they are looking for, for example, the Higgs Boson. Most of these particles do not live for very long so mostly they look for the particles they decay into. The detectors are very complex. Particles are identified by the direction and how far they travel into the detector. Earlier this year CERN reported that they may have found the Higgs Boson particle but further research efforts are required.

The visitors entrance at CERN

On a tour of the microcosm: a museum of particle physics with Gerjan Bobbink, our host for the day

Equipment previously used at CERN

That is a lot of wiring!

On a tour of the magnet hall

What the LHC tunnel really looks like!

The central CERN control centre

The ATLAS detector control room

After an interesting day at CERN it was time to Go! Go! Go! to our hostel in Geneva. The walk from the tram stop to the hostel gave the impression of a seedy city which was not improved during our stay. We had an unfortunate incident where our secretary Dijana’s handbag was stolen while we were busy checking in. The perpetrators were caught on camera and it only took them 2 seconds to take advantage of a turned head.

Unfortunate as it was, we had prior arrangements for a dinner cruise on a boat around Lake Geneva so it was not long before it was Go! Go! Go! to the lake and waiting boat. The boat cruise was very relaxed with good views of the lake and surrounds on a quiet evening with the lights twinkling. The last evening of the trip saw the group gather for a last drink in a pub before heading back for one more hostel sleep over.

There was some free time on Saturday morning before heading to the airport which I used to explore the streets of Geneva with Susanne, Lillianne and Mina. Geneva seems to lack a city centre and generally seems to be run down. This walkabout only confirmed the seedy impression of the previous evening and we were happy to head back along the safer shores of the lake.

The fountain on Lake Geneva

Mausolée du Duc de Brunswick on the South bank of Lake Geneva

Go! Go! Go! to the last stop, Geneva Cointrin Airport for our flight back to Amsterdam!

Thanks Nynke for taking us on a great lab trip to Switzerland; to Dijana, Bojk and Charl whom I helped to organise the trip with; and to everyone for making the trip so awesome!

More posts to follow on our time in the USA!

Have a good week and don’t get washed away if you live in the Eastern Cape!

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