Lovisa Rygaard - Travel Award Interview

Congratulations on winning the PHGS Travel Award 2024. You are one of a total of four PHGS members who have won the 2024 award and thus received up to 3,000 euros to finance participation in a scientific event. For which event did you use the PHGS Travel Award money for?

I first attended the CERN European School of High Energy Physics (ESHEP) which was the event I was hoping to attend with the PIER Travel Award. Then I was also able to use the remaining travel funding to attend the CMS Exotica Workshop 2024.

Where, when and for how long did the event take place?

ESHEP was in a small town called Peebles in Scotland, just outside of Edinburgh, at the end of September for two weeks (September 25-October 8). The CMS Exotica Workshop was at the Imperial Collage in London, in the beginning of December for 3 days (December 16-18).

Please describe the event. Who was the organizer? Were there many people present or only a few? Is it a regular event or a one-time event? What was the event about? Which speakers or interesting people were there?

ESHEP is a yearly school arranged by CERN for PhD students in High Energy Physics. I think we were about 70 students attending, and we had lectures on different topics in HEP with very interesting speakers. For example, we had the theorist John Ellis speaking about Beyond the Standard Model Theories (and the naming of the penguin diagram), Louis Lyons teaching statistics in HEP, and UK BBC presenters teaching us tools for physics outreach. We also had a special Q&A session with the CERN director Fabiola Gianotti.

The CMS Exotica Workshop is also a yearly event arranged by the CMS Exotica group. This is for everyone active in the group working on analyses in CMS with exotic signatures, such as long-lived particles as an example which I am part of. We had a lot of presentations of the on-going analyses in our group and I had interesting discussions with people working on similar signatures as I have in my PhD thesis.

Please describe your role at the event. Were you mainly a listener? A visitor? Did you give a talk or display a poster? Were you there to meet people for discussions?

At ESHEP, I was attending as a student listening to lectures and participating in discussion sessions that we attended every afternoon. One evening we had a poster session where I presented a poster of my phenomenology study that I published last year.
At the CMS Exotica workshop I was also listening and mainly meeting people for discussions. I was discussing analysis strategies with other people and introduced myself and my thesis work to people performing similar analyses, people I am still keeping in touch with for collaborations. I also have a position as a contact in the CMS Exotica group where I am currently focusing on creating a custom data format for analyses in the CMS Exotica group, so I was there to promote this and discuss the formatting of this data format with people in the group.

Please describe how you benefited from the event. Did you get the chance to broaden and strengthen your network? Did you gain new scientific knowledge and/or received feedback on your scientific findings? Were you able to clarify questions that will help you in your further work on your doctorate?

At ESHEP I gained a broader knowledge in the field of High Energy Physics which will be very useful for writing my PhD thesis. I will be able to go back to these lectures later on to better describe the theoretical physics of my analysis and the particle model I am using to search for new particles in my PhD.

At the CMS Exotica Workshop I had a lot of interesting and useful discussions which have already proven useful in my now broadened network within the CMS Exotica group. I had a few questions about observations I made in my results and I was able to get answers to this from other people at the Workshop.

What was the best thing about the event?

I would say that there were two aspects about ESHEP that I really enjoyed. First of all, the opportunity to attend lectures in my field to refresh my knowledge from my master’s degree and extend it further. As I have not attended any courses during my PhD this far, this school was very valuable. The other aspect I really enjoyed was to meet so many people within my field, lecturers and other students, to discuss different aspects of the field together and hear what other students are working on.
For the CMS Exotica Workshop the best part of the event the networking. I learned about another team using the same model as I am that I can now compare my results with. And I got feedback on some of the variables I am using in my thesis that I was unsure about the behaviour.

Was it worth taking part in the event respectively having made the trip?

Yes, I found both events I was able to attend with the Travel Award very valuable for my PhD, in different ways. ESHEP gave me knowledge of the underlying theories my PhD thesis is based on, and the CMS Exotica Workshop gave me knowledge of the technical details of my implementations of my PhD thesis.

Is there anything you would advise or recommend to future participants?

I would recommend PhD students in HEP to attend the European School of High Energy Physics. It is a great experience to spend two weeks discussing physics and meet like minded people in the field.

Thank you very much, Lovisa, and all the best to you for your further studies!