Entering 3rd year of PhD

Time has flied so fast that now I am entering the 3rd year of my PhD. After upgrading myself at the EDIT 2013 school at KEK and J-PARC, I am back in ETH taking some courses to improve myself and also spending time on teaching the advanced student laboratory. At the same time, since a postdoc from PSI is leaving to the United States, I was travelling a lot to PSI to have more discussions and had some kind of technical and knowledge transfer about one of the projects that I have to take over from him. It was a waste that I didn't spend more time before, to work together with him. However, that whole month was really fruitful and I had a better idea of how this project is going forward.

Not related to my PhD but on 5th of May, there was the 13th General Election of my country. As I have already went back during the Chinese New Year, I have decided to vote by postal and therefore one week before the election, all the students went to Bern to vote at the Embassy of Malaysia. The voting process was not so complicated and there was around 30 people who were there deciding the future of our country. And we were following the announcement of the results the next week while having party at one of the students' house. The outcome was disappointing for a lot of people but it was moving into a good direction I would say, as a democratic country.

Something worth mention about this year was that, IT IS REALLY COLD! Seriously, the weather has been very cold (than normal years) since October last year, and while other European countries are having > 30 degrees, it was around 10 degrees in Zurich. And during a long weekends (+Monday), I escaped with my gf to Milano and Cinque Terre in Italy, because the weather forecast said that it WILL BE SUNNY over the WEEKENDS!

It turned out that the first day in Milano was rainy but not so bad. I had to spend 4 hours taking a train there though. However the shops over there were too high end that I managed to buy only the postcards and an Italian basic conversation book. Looking at how people spending their money, I was very suspicious about the economic crisis mentioned in the newspapers. Next day in the morning we took the early train departing to Cinque Terre, the town Monterosso to be exactly, which takes about 3 hours. On the way the train went through Genova and started from there we had a nice view of the coast from the train.

As we arrived at the Monterosso, the first town on the North of Cinque Terre (5 villages), we were overwhelmed by the tourists, mainly coming from America. But still, it has been a long time we have been to a beach and we completely forgetting about the other tourists. After checking in, we took the train departing to the last village, Riomaggiore. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was a landslide a few days before and they have closed the hiking trails linking the 5 villages. So we had to take a train from there to the 4th village from the north, Manarola. And this was the best of all, and one of my favorite travel locations so far. The sky was super blueish and the seafood in the restaurant was perfect, if not too much. We couldn't eat until the next day basically, after having 6 appetizers, 2 main courses, fine wine and desserts as lunch sets they offered.

Manarola

Then we spent some time walking around the village and took some nice pictures. And if you like photography, this is definitely the place you should visit in the future. Afterwards, we went to the other villages as well and there were very nice as well, although not as much as Manarola. Then after having a night walk in Monterosso with delicious local ice creams, we were completely exhausted. The next day, we spent about 8 hours on the trains, with a break at Milano while waiting for the train, and finally reached Zurich in the night. 

This trip was really random but I am glad we have made it! :)

Japan trip spring 2013

A few weeks after coming back to Zurich, I had a trip to Japan to attend a detector technology school. It was my second time going back to Japan after graduating and the longest one as well for more than 2 weeks. Basically I spent 1/3 of time in Tokyo, 1/3 in KEK and 1/3 in J-PARC. First time to do was of course to meet my fellow Malaysian friends in Tokyo (quite a lot were from Osaka but now working at Tokyo) and then enjoy Japanese Rahmen! (was eating it almost everyday when I was at Kyoto) Seriously, my life won't be as interesting without them, and some of them were with me during my ups and downs in Kyoto and Tokyo. I am very glad to have them, and it was a hard decision to leave Japan and to go to Switzerland.

Before starting of the school, I had the chance to visit my lawyer friend at Roppongi for lunch in a Chinese restaurant nearby. He was my badminton buddy back in my dormitory at Tokyo, TIEC. Even though we are from completely different background, we had good time together and were competing in a badminton team tournament together as one of the men doubles.

Back to the real business, I was thinking of participating in EDIT since last year. However, I had not much experience with the latest detection technologies that time hence has postponed it until this year. It was being held at Fermilab, United State. I have chosen photon detector and neutrino detector courses for the school and was glad to be given both my first choices under tough competition. I spend my first week at KEK for the photon detector, and have learned a lot regarding it. (I am working with it as well in the advanced student lab and realised from this course that there are several flaws in my setup at ETH.)

There was a free day during the course which is sunday, and I visited a Japanese badminton family at Kitamatsudo. I knew them through my senior in Japan and have been keeping in touch with them since 4 years ago. I would visit them when I was in Japan to play a few rounds of badminton and this time he presented me with a Yonex racket that I was dreaming of getting one (It was about 285 CHF! and I had given up buying it). At that moment, I was completely stunned and said no, no, no, I can't accept this. However, in the end I was being persuaded somehow. What a gift!!! After the badminton session we had lunch together and I shared with them some stories of mine in Zurich. Sometimes I felt that myself is very lucky to have met so many nice people in my life. This is also the reason why I have been working so hard, hope that one day I would make them very proud of me.

For the 2nd week, I went to J-PARC for the neutrino detector course. Coincidently, my coursemate at Kyoto University is my teaching assistant! (I was supposed to be working together with him during the master course but I have decided to go to University of Tokyo to challenge myself.) I had fun working there from early morning until the evening, and then dinner together in the somehow rural Tokai village. But it was fun, with lots of great foods, especially seafoods (well maybe with lots of radiation as well). We were partying until quite late in the last dinner, and it was such a wonderful school that I will miss for some time.

As the semester was already started, I couldn't spend any extra time here and had to leave the next day to Zurich. As my gf is missing Japan very much, I am pretty sure you will be reading my 3rd trip to Japan very soon. :)

New year 2013

Finally I have my own time to invest a little bit to this blog, after 6 months. So this is basically how I was in the past few months.

As I have mentioned before in my previous post, together with JE, ZY(F) and CL, we went to Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary for our year end holidays! It is worth noting that I have decided to buy the ticket after looking at the SWISS advertisement for just 5 minutes. CHF 120 for return direct flights was for sure a good bargain and I managed to convinced my crazy friends to tag along. And the next next day after sending off ZY(M, hope to have him back but well, he doesn't like Zurich, haha) at the Zurich Airport,  we were back there again flying to Vienna airport. We were eating like hungry ghosts everyday at Vienna, from Schnitzel, Spare ribs to dozens of desserts at famous cake houses. Visited a couple of palaces, museums, and christmas markets in the city.

After 2 days in Vienna, we took a train to Budapest and arrived there with highly alert mode, as we have heard that pickpocket rate is very high there. Although our plan was to look for suspicious people and avoid them, in the end I think we were the most suspicious people there.  This was for the first time I have been to an ex-communist country and I could really feel the difference compared to cities like Zurich, Vienna. As Hungary is in the middle of Germany and Russia, they suffered a lot during the World War and it took them quite some time to recover. For that reason, the living standard here is not as high compared to western Europe and the living cost is also much lower than in Zurich. 100 CHF was basically enough to survive there for 2 days including hostel and foods and souvenirs. The best view in Budapest was perhaps the Parliament that is situated next to the Danube river.

It took me a few days to recover from the travels and then it was 31st of December 2012. As usual, together with a bunch of crazy PhD students we went to Ah Fatt's place at Dietikon and had our new year eve party over there. On the way back, we did our count down in a bus with many strangers and that was superbly amazing! Afterwards we went to Rigiblick to enjoy the view of Zurich downtown and fireworks, of course not without beers and snacks. Different countries, different locations, different friends every year. Time is ticking away from us .......

Before I could spend time flashing back all the previous events, busy life started again in the new year. After several meetings at PSI, I had also a demonstration of advanced student lab for physics teachers in Switzerland. Then a special lecture on Bayesian analysis in a particle physics experiment by my boss's PhD supervisor. Then I was back in Bolehland again together with CL. Oh, and before that, I have won finally 2 single matches and being promoted to D1. However, my team fared badly and was last in the 3rd league. Will be dropped to 4th league in the coming season and hopefully we can get back to 3rd league again next year.

Back to my back home trip. Celebrating my birthday on the arrival day's evening (haha, on purpose!) was perhaps not a good idea because of jet lag. The foods were really nice but my stomach wasn't in fully enjoy mode. But still it was great to be back at home. Maybe it is because of me getting older and the limited time I could spend with my family, I started to appreciate time together a lot compared to last time. My parents are in their 50s, and I am soon 30s. No matter how far apart, I love you Mummy and Daddy! and of course my sister as well. (else she will kill me, :p) In this 2 weeks, I have accomplished almost everything that I have planned to do, such like hair cut (bloody hell RM 7 only!!! compared to RM 150 in Zurich), car driving lesson (yes, I still don't have my license yet, T.T), new specs (luckily the eye sights are not getting too bad), meeting elementary (after 17 years! everybody still the same. What a miracle!) and high school friends, etc. Chatting with them reminded me of how little I still remember of the past.
This is most probably my brain is full of information about new location and friends each time I moved to another city. (Penang->Osaka->Kyoto->Tokyo->Zurich) And I am sure the list will continue to grow. Two weeks were really short, I wished to have more. Perhaps after my PhD, I can think of spending 3 months with my family.

End of the year 2012

2012 is quite a fruitful year and "luckily" the "End of the world" didn't turn out to be true. Even though there is still a year end holiday trip to Vienna and Budapest to follow, I am quite satisfied with the overall performance this year and managed to identify a few sections to be improved.

    Celebrating CNY at home was very rare for me in the past few years due to the crashing dates of CNY and examinations in the Japanese universities. For the first time I went back to Penang together with my GF for CNY taking SQ. It was always happy to be back in your hometown and meeting family, relatives and friends. Visiting each other during the CNY, BBQ at high schoolmate's house, Karaoke, Futsal with old time friends, Birthday party in a hotel restaurant, and more .... all are good memories, considering I would not be going back for good in the near future.

    On my flight back, we have a transit at Paris and we spent several days touring around the city. However, it was damned cold! At the moment we left Zurich, the temperature was around 5'C and we expected it to go up once we returned. Hence all the clothes with us were not so strong against the below zero temperature. Fighting with those crazy cold winds, we managed to go up the Eiffel Tower, only to find ourselves shaking like hell the moment we walk out to take some pictures. Due to the extreme cold, most of the time were being spent in the hotel room or cafes. On the last day we took TGV back to Zurich and felt relieved when we reach home! Paris, see you next time during the summer.

    Perhaps the most encouraging event in terms of academic is the acceptance of my first co-authored paper by PRL. It was not the kind of breakthrough in Physics but still I felt proud of it after putting lots of effort onto it.

    The most "exciting" moment of the year was the trip to QED 2012 international school at Corsica. Started with the delay of flight from Zurich to Paris CDG (well, Air France), then I missed my connection flight from Paris Orly to Ajaccio. I had to wait in the airport for 8 hours and I fall asleep for at least 3 times during the wait time. Luckily all my belongings were still with me. It was already 12 am in the night by the time I reached Ajaccio and had no choice but to take a taxi to the Institute of Scientific Research Cargese. Fortunately the arrangement was being made by the organiser and I just had to wait for the taxi driver to pick me up at the airport. There was another Hungarian woman sharing the taxi and thanked god she could speak some French and communicate with the driver. Imagine 90 mins of drive in the completely dark island roads without any conversation! Despite all these bad starts, the QED school turned out to be a great one and I managed to learn a lot and made some geek friends. And for the first time I have prepared both oral and poster presentations.

    Soon after I came back from the school, I started my football training for the MSA 4 nation football competition. After weeks of exercising with a group of African football teams, I managed to contribute a bit to the 2nd place won by MSA.

    I attended Swiss Physics Society Meeting this year which was held in my university, ETH. I gave a talk this time (last year at EPF Lausanne which was poster)
and it was not bad I guess. 2 months later I gave another one during the Zurich Particle Physics PhD seminar after I came back from another school at Zuoz. This was the one organised by PSI biennially, and I managed to met up my junior in Tokyo during the school. In fact he spent some days at my place and I brought him to some places in Chur and Zurich. I guessed he was quite shocked with the living cost here.

    At the same time, I was busy on the EM field simulation for the beam time at MuSR, PSI. After working most of the time on COMSOL and GEANT4, finally I got to identify some mistakes in the simulations done by others last year and did some corrections to the data analysis last year as well. The beam time turned out to be successful as well as there was no serious problem during the run and the data looks okay. The analysis is still on the way but should be finalised soon.

    In September, I re-visited London again to renew my passport. It was a kind of coincidence as my last trip here ended on 5th Sep (2010) and this time I arrived on 5th Sep (2012). The process of passport renewal was quite simple and the nasi lemak sold at the Embassy of Malaysia was very nice as well. This time I managed to visit some of the places that was missed last time, such as Hyde Park, Oxford Road (don't come here unless you want to have an empty pocket or wallet), and more. Also I have visited my physicist friend at Cambridge and joined a punting trip around the river.
He had given me the wrong number but somehow we managed to meet each other on the street (Penang lang faces, haha.) thanks to a time window discussed beforehand. Did a lot of shoppings and eatings (Dim sum, Rahmen, Fish n Chips, etc) Gonna come here again next year when my GF has to renew her passport. :)

   This autumn marked my first participation in the Swiss Badminton League, 3th league. Even though it is quite expensive to get a license, I like the system here where they record all your played matches and even has a ranking system just like the one of Badminton World Federation. The classes are from D3 to A1 (D3,D2,D1,C3,... until A1), and you get points by beating the players ranked above you. Points gained through tournament and interclub are being calculated together. Throughout the autumn and winter, I managed to win a few matches in the tournaments but however I lost all my 8 matches (singles and doubles and mixed) so far. There are still 8 league matches next year and I need to put in more effort in my training. Even though I have joined a training course at the beginning of December, it will take some time to fully utilised what I have learnt there.

    So, bye bye 2012 and hope that you are a good one, 2013!

Football

Almost every student from my high school (it is an all-male high school and hence Shao Lin temple) has played football before. I am not sure if it is a good thing or what, it is the only sports activity that we have for "Pendidikan Jasmani" (Physical Education) throughout five years of secondary school.

It sounds like we are well equipped with all the attires and accessories. Actually the opposite! There are many restrictions on our attire during the match; only school shoes (white!) and house T-shirt ( R,G,B and Y colors). Some even wear that duck-shit-green school short, orz. However, the football is even worst; it does not look like football, but like a volleyball. When you kick it, it feels like a balloon. Until now, I have no idea it was actually what ball. The sad case is when the field is muddy, our parents had hard times washing our shoes.
(To be continued......)

QED International School 2012 @ Corsica

Time elapsed really fast as I have now headed in to the second year of my Ph. D. studies. Life is of course, as interesting as usual. From mid to end of April, I had the chance to participate in an international school and workshop on quantum electrodynamics (QED 2012) at Corsica, France. It is a beautiful island situated in the Mediterranean sea and also the place where Napoleon was born. The school took place at Cargese, a small village near the seaside with mesmerizing views.

I have booked the flight two months in advance from Zurich to Paris CDG and then from Paris Orly to Ajaccio airport. However, no matter how well you have prepared, there are dozens of ways to screw up your plan. I woke up earlier in the morning (5:30 I guess) and arrived more than one hour before my flight. Everything went well and I was on board punctually waiting for it to take off. Only then I was told that the flight has some technical problems and it could not be operated. After a while they announced that the computer system hanged and they need to start it and redo all the necessary procedures. By the time the problem was solved almost two hours has passed and I told myself I am gonna miss the next flight.


Arrived at the Paris CDG airport, quickly I rushed to the counter to ask for the direction to the Orly airport. Since I have checked the bus option beforehand, so I took it but found myself stuck in the hectic Paris traffic. OMG ....... As expected, I arrived at the Orly airport one minute before departure. Needless to say, I missed my flight and the person at the counter even laughed and said "oh! you flight has just taken off ~". Experienced this for the first time in my life, I had no idea what to do, other than to think that I need to buy another air ticket to fly myself to the destination. Luckily the airport staff suggested me to go to the Air France customer service counter to seek for assistance. I made myself look very sad and explained everything to the "big boss" in the office and after calling several phones he decided to issue me with a boarding pass at the night to Corsica! Phew!!! I was lucky but then needed to wait for eight hours at the airport (after rushing here and there I had no more energy to walk around Paris anymore of course). Even worse, it was just a small airport and within 20 minutes I have went through every corner of it. Finally I sat down at a place where there is a clear view of all the airplanes taking off and even fell asleep a couple of times before this damn long 480 minutes has passed.


(to be continued ......)

My first ever publication!

My first paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL)

After working in Physics for so many years, finally my name appears in one of the most prestigious journals in Physics, Physical Review Letters (PRL) and its title is "Muonium Emission into Vacuum from Mesoporous Thin Films at Cryogenic Temperatures".

This research topic was actually not mentioned when I applied for the PhD, but I started to work on it since February last year for about half a year. Then most of the time was spent improving the data analysis and polishing up the paper. Everything is explained in the paper but for non-Physicist, I would explain it as below;

The main idea of this work is to test a material which could be used for next generation precision experiments that allow Physicists to extract even more precise values of particle masses, and to test the charge ratio between particles.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me. :)

One year after the decision

As usual, time flies at the speed of light and one year has passed since I have made the decision to come here for PhD. Compared to what I had anticipated if I followed the previous path, I would say that I have made the correct decision.

Working at ETH with the current group, I have the chance to improve what I was experienced at, such as data analysis and DAQ electronics and also to develop some new skills such as working on plastic scintillating fibers, DRS4 waveform analysis, Inventor Mechanical Design and Comsol Physics simulator. And of course the most challenging one is perhaps German language that takes infinite time to master. It is fun to learn it though. Spending some time attending lectures of advanced scientific programming and quantum information theory also proves beneficial, as I could learn more arts in programming and use more advanced tool and also have more new ideas to aid my research works.

I have my trip to PSI increased recently due to the beam time for Muon related experiments.

It is great to work there with many interesting stuffs but it could be painful to work on those hardware and to do strength demanding works such as moving Lead blocks (~10kg per block!!).

You have to be careful as well as the surrounding is always full of notices of HIGH VOLTAGE, HIGH CURRENT, HIGH MAGNETIC FIELD, etc...... and sometimes you have a huge bottle of liquid helium travelling across your head... that's how it is to work in a particle physics research center...LOL

My freetime is of course as fantastic as my working life. (^-^)p

I have participated in two badminton tournaments, one was organized by Malaysian Swiss Association and another one Zurich Academic Sports Association. I was lucky enough to have won in both occasions, earning myself a MIGROS cash card and an invitation ticket to Swiss Badminton Open at Basel next year for the whole week. But still I feel that myself is still very inconsistent in terms of basics so I have decided to join a club in Zurich. I am still visiting at the moment and perhaps will join soon.