My college offers an opportunity to four students from multidisciplinary fields to conduct research internship at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland. Having a decent CGPA, I was selected for the interview. I was asked what I wanted to do at CERN and what my strengths and weaknesses were. I talked about the research I aimed to do at CERN, mapping my previous project at Jadavpur University, Kolkatta. I explained that entrepreneurship was my strength, and that’s when the interview took a different turn. A series of questions followed — difference between an entrepreneur and an engineer, and a physicist, and so on. I answered confidently and observed that the interviewer was convinced.
Before long, I was selected as a summer intern at CERN, funded by the Government of India. My head supervisor was Dr. Archana Sharma, the first permanent Indian scientist at CERN.
The organisation has several experiments running together such as CMS, ALICE, LHC-b, and ATLAS. My supervisor would work at CMS, but I was asked to work on the ALICE experiment in the GEM lab under the supervision of two physicists: Chilo Garabatos, the project leader, and Robert Helmut Munzer.
Challenge
My research interest was on the generation of time-efficient and cost-effective algorithm and its FPGA implementation mapped with the GEM lab. They had collected test data from the upgraded ALICE Time Projection Chamber (ALICE – TPC). However, the magnanimous amount of test data was in an unreadable format and couldn’t be analysed. I was responsible for programming that data into a readable format and analysing it using object-oriented data-analysis software, CERN-ROOT.
The work culture at CERN is amazing. There is no pressure, despite which everyone understands the importance of deadlines. I completed my work ahead of time and submitted a report when I was taken for an underground visit to the place where the actual particle detectors are located. They are located at different points of a pipe named Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is 127 km in circumference, running 100 meters under the earth’s surface, stretching across France and Switzerland. I visited the part of the LHC named “CMS Point-5”. We were taken 100 meters below the surface of the earth in a lift and given a tour around the detector and the supercomputers. That five-hour visit to the LHC was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Courtesy: www.internshala.com
