Sunday, October 30, 2011

SUSY11 at Fermilab

Attending SUSY 2011 conference at Fermilab this year was an awesome experience, thanks to department of science and technology (India) and IIT Bombay for providing the necessary financial support. My trip to Chicago was surprisingly very good, I never expected such a good service in Air India. Last year I had very bad experience with Air India flight to London. But this time either they have improved a lot, or may be they provide superior service in the Delhi-Chicago flight. Anyway, I reached O'Hare airport in the morning of 27th August, and it was surprisingly very hot. May be Chicago is like that only during summer. I took a cab to a place near Fermilab where my accommodation was booked. The taxi driver was a funny guy who thought I was from Italy. The place is quite far from the main city and I had to spend around 90 USD to get there. It's a country of the rich after all, no good public transport available. I forgot to mention a great coincidence: I found three known people in the Delhi-Chicago flight one of whom came for the same SUSY conference and the other two had a connecting flight to somewhere else!

Fermilab is a really nice place with a beautiful surroundings. The conference was nicely organized, specially the welcome dinner and the tevatron celebration party was really awesome with unlimited drinks. The only thing which I was worrying about also went well without any trouble. Yes, I am talking about my talk. Thanks to the audience in the parallel session for not screwing it up ;-). The people were more or less depressed because of two things. The tevatron shut down and the LHC results shown in Lepton Photon 2011 conference held in the previous week. But there were lots of optimist and enthusiast as well who will never give up. It was really a memorable experience to be there.

Since Fermilab is located at a very boring place and I couldn't afford to hire a car, I could not explore anything about the place. However one funny thing I noticed was the name of various small towns and villages which resemble so much with those in Europe. For example, the nearest railway station was in a place called Geneva. It was funny that I went to Fermilab in USA and while returning from fermilab to the city I had to take a train from Geneva. Ironically, Fermilab's rival laboratory CERN is located in Geneva, Switzerland. I spend two days in Chicago. It's a beautiful city full of lots of tourists. And I was there during a weekend luckily and could see couple of functions, festivals etc. Chicago jazz festival was also going on that time. The Michigan lake which look like an ocean is really amazing. I kept walking along the lakeside most of the time, the view of the lake with the huge skyscrapers in the background is really amazing. I could in fact identify most of the buildings shown in the recent Transformer movie. It was a great experience indeed.

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