Meeting at Sursee

CHIPP is the acronym of Swiss Institute of Particle Physics, which I belong to, since the beginning of my PhD. The CHIPP annual planery meeting is usually 2 days long, but since there are many things going on this year, it was a 3-day-meeting at Sursee, in the Canton of Lucerne. Even though most of the students were not attending the meeting, I was pretty impressed by the number of particle physicist in a small country like Switzerland. Perhaps less than a dozen back in my howe town.

Along with updates from phenomenologist engaging with LHC physics, current status of the LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS were also reported, neutrino updates, along with several planned experiments at CERN and PSI regarding anti-hydrogen and positive muon. While most of the items above were known before I arrive at the meeting, there were several "new and interesting" proposals going on at the moment.

First, LONG baseline neutrino experiment from CERN to Finland. Yes, no kidding,
read here for more details. Next, a 100 km tunnel for e+e- collider at CERN (read here).
Considering the time needed from planning to actual physics run of LHC experiments,
the plans were quite reasonable and sounded plausible from what we have achieved currently in the LHC and neutrino experiments. Hopefully all these projects get funded and receive huge international supports.

Other than physics related projects, it seems that plastic scintillating fibre detector is a hot research topic at the moment.  A professor from Geneva University claimed that it was his idea to start with, and now everybody is following the same path. Other than application for LHCb experiment, it is also intended for mu3e experiment where timing and very high rate are crucial for the reconstruction of muon decay vertex. Several type of MPPC arrays were also developed together with Hamamatsu and I hope that I am able to build something nice for my coming project in the muon compression experiment.