{"id":1090,"date":"2015-03-31T14:13:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T14:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/emma13\/?p=508"},"modified":"2017-02-20T09:36:31","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T09:36:31","slug":"happy-easter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/2015\/03\/31\/happy-easter\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Easter!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve finally finally finally finished my last lab report!<\/p>\n

Labs this year have not been fun, which is a shame because last year I actually enjoyed them, and felt like I was improving and learning things. Not so much this year.<\/p>\n

Oh well\u2014I\u2019ve filled out a very angry feedback form, so with any luck the structure of third year labs might change in the future. And they\u2019re over now! Onwards to Easter, chocolate and revision.<\/p>\n

This year I\u2019m feeling a lot calmer about exams in general\u2014not because I feel any more prepared (!) but because revision over Easter is something I\u2019ve been doing for the past five years and is now the most routine of routines. I think I\u2019ll find it more strange after next year with no exams to come in the summer, though I expect it won\u2019t be too hard to adapt!<\/p>\n

In the last week of term I made a cake of the LHCb detector, which I thought might coincide with the re-booting of the LHC, but unfortunately as you\u2019ve probably heard they are having some technical problems. The cake was tasty anyway.<\/p>\n

Imperial are very involved with the LHCb detector. It\u2019s not what you might think of as the archetypal spherical LHC detector\u2014instead it\u2019s sort of stack of cuboid shaped things. (If you want to find out what each of the cuboid shaped things does, this link<\/a> might help!)<\/p>\n

The b in LHCb stands for beauty\u2014because what you might know of as a bottom quark is sometimes also called a beauty quark (the top quark can also be called the truth quark, making the pair of them truth and beauty). The LHCb detector studies b and anti-b quark decays, in an attempt to find out why there isn\u2019t that much anti-matter around today.<\/p>\n

\"CAKE\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I made the tracks of the particles out of spun sugar. In fact, in the spirit of the food based Masters projects I have applied to, I tried to make them out of edible optical fibres, so I could shine light through them and the light would end up where the particle deposited its energy in the detector, but I couldn\u2019t quite get them clear enough for this to work. I\u2019ll have to try again with liquid glucose, which is apparently a better method.<\/p>\n

The solar eclipse in London was also a bit of a non-event\u2014we have a solar eclipse party planned on the roof of Blackett with telescopes and food and everything, but the clouds made it impossible to see anything, which was a shame.<\/p>\n

The CubeSat naming competition I posted about from a few weeks ago is going well! I have a shortlist of the names given in, but we are going to get people to vote on them at the Imperial Festival in May. The CubeSat project is also coming along well\u2014the mechanism that turns and rotates the satellite is almost finished and seems to be working really well. Fingers crossed, we should be approaching ESA this summer! Pretty exciting stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which it\u2019s the end of term!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1040,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126852,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-third-year-0","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1040"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1939,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}