What I like about my work?

While my physics analysis is still on data taken in 2011, my service/calibration project is for data of 2012, so I am enjoying both the luxury of an analysis of a well understood dataset as well as the excitement and surprises of the new data as it streams from the detector. It is this part when I find it essential to be here at CERN and share the compassion with other colleagues working on the same or similar project, discussing informally over coffees (and via many emails and, less excitingly, many meetings as well). Many projects and new ideas come from discussions between meetings or from random randez-vous with colleagues in the restaurant, office buildings or Cern cafeterias.

My physics projects include the analysis of pairs of top-antitop quarks produced in the ATLAS detector, born in proton-proton collisions provided by the LHC accelerator. Top quarks are so far and still the heaviest elementary particles, which (discovered in 1995 at Fermilab, USA) are becoming important background processes for searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of the microcosm. Besides precisely measuring top quark properties and constraining theories describing the top-antitop final state, we are able to direct our colleagues on which model better describes our data in different corners of the phase space.

I enjoy working together with enthusiasts for the same goal, I like when we together learn and develop, see something new for the first time, understand how and why things work the way we see them. I like learning from clear-minded students and putting people together to create new opportunities and projects.