Two Undergrads, One Conference, and 5,280 Feet of Physics
The beautiful state of Colorado, home to mountains, skiing, South Park, and plenty of scientific energy, set the stage for this year’s APS Global Physics Summit in Denver. Our group was excited to head out west, present our work, and spend the week surrounded by so much great physics and so many interesting conversations.
Getting there was its own little adventure. We made the trip from Boston to Denver, hauled ourselves and our bags through the airport, made it onto the plane with coffee in hand, and eventually traded the cold Northeast for a quite gray-looking Colorado. After landing in Denver’s somewhat strange airport, we made our way into the city and got settled in, ready for a packed few days of talks, catching up with collaborators, exploring new ideas, and seeing everything APS had to offer.
At the meeting, us undergrads both presented work connected to future collider detector studies. Katie presented research led by Jan on improving the simulation of beam-induced backgrounds at FCC-ee, with a focus on making the modeling more realistic and compatible to Geant4 simulation so detector occupancy can be understood more reliably. Estrella presented research led by Maria on comparative studies of FCC vertex detector layouts and how geometry choices affect tracking and vertexing performance. Together, the talks reflected a shared theme of figuring out how to build detectors that can actually meet the demands of next-generation collider physics! Beyond these talks, it was also nice to meet some of our collaborators in person for the first time.
One of the best parts of the week was getting to hear such a wide variety of talks connected to the future of collider physics and beyond. APS has that fun feeling of being able to spend one part of the day thinking about detector layouts, backgrounds, and tracking performance, and another hearing about big-picture challenges for entirely new machines or precision experiments looking for tiny signs of new physics. APS Global Physics Summit showcased topics in March and April meetings, meaning we saw a large spread of talks covering nuclear and particle physics, AMO, astrophysics and cosmology, condensed matter physics, plasma and beam physics, biophysics, instrumentation, and more!
We especially enjoyed sessions on muon collider detector design and technology requirements, which made it clear just how extreme that environment is and how much creative work is going into making those detectors possible (a direct analog to beam backgrounds at FCC-ee!) It was also fun to hear talks connected to fundamental symmetry violation and indirect searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, which brought in a different angle on many of the same big questions. Katie also got her copy of Trapped Charged Particles and Fundamental Interactions signed by co-author Klaus Blaum, which was a pretty cool APS moment!
After the conference, we were ready to head back to Boston. As nice as Denver was, we did find ourselves missing the frigid New England spring and the familiar sight of the frozen Charles River still pretending it was winter. Overall, APS was a great experience, and we came back energized by the talks, conversations, and all the exciting physics we got to see.