Jenny Boek (Germany)
| Hi! My name is Jenny and I am 24 years old. I was born and grew up in Wuppertal in Germany. At the University of Wuppertal I've just begun my PhD in high energy particle physics. Here you can see me in the middle of my work! |
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When I went to school, my favourite interests were astronomy and space travel. Because of that, I worked for some weeks at a planetarium, which was a great experience. After school I directly began to study physics at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. At the university I learned that in physics there are more than one interesting areas.
So finally I became a particle physicist. In particle physics we are interested in the origin and composition of matter and we ask questions like: What are the smallest particles? Or: How many smallest particles exist?
My working group is involved at CERN, the European Research Centre for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. There is a big tunnel located 100 m deep in the earth which has 27 km circumference. In this tunnel two beams of protons are accelerated in opposite directions with nearly the speed of light and are collided in four points. At one of these points, the ATLAS detector is situated. ATLAS consists of some smaller detectors and is 45 m long and 22 m high. With this huge detector and the collision of proton beams, we can make physical measurements and get answers to the questions above.
A diploma thesis in Germany takes one year. In this time, I worked for a safety system for the pixel detector, the innermost subdetector of ATLAS. Doing this, I learned a lot of things of which I had never thought before. I mostly enjoyed travelling to CERN. 3000 people work there permanently and additionally 6500 visiting scientists come there from all over the world. It is very interesting to cooperate with so many different people. But this is only successful if everyone speaks English at least a little bit.
I've just began my PhD in physics at the University of Wuppertal, which will take about three years. During that time, I will work for a new detector for ATLAS. For this, I will test a chip which will control the detector. Controlling the detector is important because current, voltage and temperature have to be observed and only if they are normal can the detector be operated.
Beside working on my PhD, I have enough time for my hobbies. I like dancing, walking with my dog and additionally I still spend some time on my interest in astronomy. Every month I meet some other people who are interested in astronomy and sometimes in starlit nights we observe the sky with our telescopes.