Start of Fall Semester 2011

It has been a long time since I last had the feeling of the beginning of a semester. And I am feeling good with it, definitely a good sign!

As the seniority goes up, instead of only learning, I have to do some teaching as well, for the student labs, teaching students how to perform proper scientific researches and guiding master students until they finish their master theses.

My current main research is finally coming to an end, where me and collaborators are preparing a paper for a journal. Finishing this will actually open up a lot of free time for myself, to conduct other things that I was hoping to do: design and construct detectors, design data acquisition system, and attend some out-of-my-field lectures.
But of course I am not forgetting the most important one: German language! Yes, finally I have taken the German language course. Hopefully I will be able to catch up the conversations of all my German colleagues soon......

Luzern

Luzern has been in my mind for half a year since I started to work at PSI and ETHZ. Finally I made a trip to it last weekend, and it was really a nice place with mesmerizing scenes.

to be continued.....

Tokyo trip

It was sooner than my expectation to be back at Tokyo again, thanks to my friend's invitation for becoming a panelist for an overseas studies seminar.

to be continued.....

Strasbourg

I was in France for about 2 weeks to attend a summer campus organized by the University of Strasbourg.

to be continued...

Swiss Physical Society Meeting 2011, Part 1

I spend most of the week in Lausanne, French speaking part of Switzerland to attend this conference. Although hoping for oral presentation, where I don't have to carry a poster all the way from Zürich, I ended up got selected for poster presentation. Well, it was not bad at all, as I can describe my work while drinking wine in front of people who are interested on it.

While thinking I am probably one of the minorities who use LaTeX for making posters, I found out alot of people are actually doing that, and I even saw some with the same layout as my first draft. After all, we are doing the same business, Physics!

Although the official language for this conference is English, I could hardly listen to any English conversation, as most of the people here are the mother tongue of German or French. And the president of SPS even switching the language according to his will during the general assembly of SPS.

to be continued......

Second month of PhD

Time flies really fast and one month has passed without my notice.

My first month was actually full of administrative works, and also meeting up some fellow Malaysians in Switzerland. Other than spending a lot of money, the rest are still good, pretty good start so far.

My "real" PhD life will start next month, where I will do a poster presentation regarding my research work on muonium production at Swiss Physical Society Conference 2011 at EPF Lausanne. As I am using only Ubuntu, terminal only all these days, I challenged myself to create that poster using LaTeX. The design is not that good but I would rather put more time on my research than poster.

After the poster presentation, I will need to prepare for the MuSR experiment, as I have only beam time of four days. A few samples needed to be tested, and also different configurations of magnetic field have to be decided in order to extract both information regarding muon and muonium.

Then a week later I will be going to Strasbourg, France for European Summer Campus 2011. It is a summer school organized by the University of Strasbourg on three topics, particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. They actually have different focuses every year, and I am lucky to have this topic related to my research field. Else it would be hard for me to join.

After the summer school will perhaps be the discussion of the MuSR experiment. Of course, publication will be the best but lots of work has to be done in order to achieve that.

Starting my new life at Zurich

Sorry for being lazy to update this blog.....I enjoyed my vacation in Malaysia for 1 month and now I am back to ETH Zurich again to officially start my PhD and scientific assistant job..... this might be confused but PhD position is really a job here in university in Switzerland.....

Anyway, I am still working hard to look for a permanent place to stay as the rooms in Zurich are very limited and takes a long time to settle down.....

Will share more when everything is stable and I feel comfortable with the life here...

Sunday

When I was in Tokyo, Sunday used to be the most crowded day for trains and streets. As I will be staying in PSI guest house for about 50 days, I guess it is better for me to get some groceries to cook, so that I can save some money for living.

Baden

Taking a bus down to the nearby city, Brugg, I found out that none of the stores are actually opening! Oh, I need to go somewhere else. But still, I am afraid that it would be the same for other cities as well, so I opted for a bigger city, Aarau, which is the the capital of Canton Aagrau. However, the train is not so frequent so I went to Baden, slightly bigger than Brugg, first instead. And I was right. The shops there are opening until at least 5 pm. Cruising into MIGROS, I bought some vegetables, juices, and some "prepared food"s. Not so pricey as compared to eating out, and also much more healthier, I hope. Have been eating lots of oily stuffs when I was in Japan, and it is time for me to change the habit.

Clock Tower in Baden

Later on, I went to Aarau as planned, bought some stuffs as well and grabbed something to eat.

As the bus to PSI ends quite early, I headed back after a short stay. Coincidently, I met one of my Japanese friends on the bus! I thought he is not coming to PSI this month! We had some nice chat and said bye bye after knowing that we will be staying at different guest house.

"Trophies"

A quite relaxed day, except I need to spend more for the transportation. LOL.