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My name is Jeremy Love, and I am a graduate student at Boston University, in the physics
department, and we're on the Meyrin Site of the CERN Laboratory, here on the border of
Switzerland and France.
CERN is the European center for nuclear research. There's a large particle accelerator called
the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. We're looking for theoretical particles, that have been
predicted by theorists, but have not yet been observed by experiment. We hope to see them
here at CERN.
I work primarily in the ATLAS experimental cavern, which is a large underground building,
which has one of the world's most complicated machines. Particle physics is a lot like looking at
what's inside a lock with boxing gloves. You have this small, delicate thing, and you just
keep hitting it to see what comes flying out. And so you're looking at what comes flying out
of these collisions,
and what you're looking at is very small and very delicate, but you're trying break it apart,
so the forces that work inside these very small areas are incredibly strong. You need
these big machines to sort of get at these very small distances.
The other C tunnel is actually filled with twelve hundred of these dipole magnets that
stretch 26 kilometers, across the French-Swiss border. So it gives you a sense of scale.
It's fun to come into work everyday and, you know, physically work on the detector, and
then to come up and work on the analysis, and look at actual physics and stuff, and see
the connection between them, and all the steps in between.
My parents aren't in any way scientists, and when I was growing up, I actually thought
I always wanted to work on volcanoes. But then, I guess I've always liked big things.
But then I read Brief History of Time when I was in high school, and from there started
reading lots of other things, and sort of fell in love with the idea of particle physics.
My thesis research is looking to discover particles that are predicted by one of these
theories that are beyond the standard model. Answering the big questions, I guess, is
what sort of has to drive you. If you're not motivated by understanding the universe, then it's probably
not going to keep you interested. It's easy to forget that these thing are why you're
doing the experiment, and to not get lost in some small detail. That's one nice thing about having a thesis, it sort
of forces you to take a step back and think about the physics. You can't just get lost
in what you're doing in the day-to-day. You have to sort of always keep the big picture in mind.
Ultimately, I'd like to graduate.