Particle Physics in California

Hello again, this time from Santa Cruz in California! Finally I am continuing my blog "Particle physics around the world" even though I am not a summer student at the moment. However, the autumn in California is far sunnier than the summer in Hamburg... But first of all, why am I here? In the context of my master thesis at DESY Hamburg on the phenomenology of elementary particles, I am now spending 5 weeks at SCIPP (Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics). I hope I will be able to learn a lot about theory from Howie Haber, the professor who supervises my project here. Another reason for my stay is to start a new cooperation between the physics departments of the University of Göttingen (my home university) and the University of California, especially the campus at Santa Cruz. I am here as the "guinnea pig", which is not the most unpleasant task, though :-) This blog will be about my activities, experiences with the Californian way of life, trips, and I guess only to a lesser extent on physics. I will try to update it as regularly as possible, but as I realized both in Finland and at Fermilab, the more activities there are, the harder it is to report everything ;-) I hope you will enjoy the pictures and stories. Feel free to write comments. Cheers! Elina