Question: What exactly does Experimental Particle Physics mean you do in an average day?

Lily Asquith answered on 17 Jun 2010:

1.About half my time is spent trying to think of ways to find the Higgs boson. This means I learn everything I can about how it might look, everything I can about the detectors we are looking for it with and everything I can about what might get in the way of us seeing it. This means alot of thinking, reading, talking to other physicists and drawing pictures.

2.The other half of my time is spent writing code (computer programmes) to see if my ideas work. I think “what if I look in the middle of the detector for a big splash of energy that doesn’t look like A, B or C” and then I have to turn the question into something the computer can understand.

3.Then I get some graphs and show them to my colleagues in a meeting, and someone says “have you thought of trying it like this..” and then I go back to stage 1, a little bit wiser ; ).