Working together for the pursuit of Truth

Awe-inspiring. That pretty much sums up everything about my 8 weeks stay in CERN as a summer student. As this was my first time venturing out of Malaysia, everything, from the European summer to the culture, is practically new to me and I have to say that I enjoyed every last one of them.

Throughout my undergraduate years, I have always been fascinated with high-energy physics as its ambition to describe our universe with fundamental laws is something I considered to be mind-blowing. It was through my final-year research supervisor that I got to know of this summer school and he encouraged me to apply for a place this summer, although initially I did not put much hope of being selected so you can imagine how ecstatic I was when I was chosen.

CERN embodies the very idea of international collaborations . Everywhere in CERN, you meet people from different backgrounds discussing physics with such intensity which shows how much they love what they are doing, staying true to the definition of ‘natural philosophers’. I was lucky enough to be able to visit both CMS and ATLAS detector and realised the obvious irony that we had to build monstrous machines to study the world of the extremely small.

Nufriki meets the CMS detector.

For my research project, I was given the task to measure and compare the Z⁰ boson polarization of simulated data generated by two different Monte Carlo generators. In the beginning, I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge one needs to know in order to do research in experimental high-energy physics but a friendly advice by my supervisor to “learn new things just as you go along with the project” and through the lectures, delivered by real experts, was reassuring indeed. Through my project, I was able to learn deeply the theoretical background of the electroweak sector in the Standard Model which I was not familiar with before, the nitty-gritty details of experimental research and the various skills that comes with it. There was never a day that went by without me learning something new and surprising and I think I learnt a lot more about particle physics in these 2 months compared to the 12 months of my final undergrad year.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my project supervisor, Markus Stoye, the CMS collaboration, CERN, the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and my undergraduate institution, University of Malaya for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was presented to me this summer. I will be attending University College London this Fall for my Master’s degree in Advanced High Energy Physics and with the experience that I had accumulated in CERN, I feel motivated and more than ready to continue my journey in particle physics. I am already missing CERN and I hope that my stay in CERN this summer is just the first of the many visits to come.