Undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Department №40, INPhE MEPhI regularly participate in various conferences and schools. The LHCC conference, held in February at CERN and traditionally dedicated to the latest research and discoveries at the LHC, was no exception. It was attended by a postgraduate student of the Department №40 Anastasia Kurova who shared her impressions.

– What do you do in ATLAS MEPhI?

– I'm analyzing proton-proton collision data. Exactly our team under the guidance of MEPhI Associate professor E.Y. Soldatov is looking for a rare process of electroweak bosons scattering, which has not been observed experimentally yet, but is predicted by the Standard model. Only by the end of the second session of the LHC scientists received enough statistics to observe the rare processes of this kind. We hope that we will be able to achieve sufficient accuracy of measurement to talk about the opening of this process. Then I'll have something to write my PhD thesis about.

– Do you like your task?

– Yes, I like my work now even more than when I was a student. The tasks have become more difficult, you have to understand almost everything yourself, dig into a ton of code and look for people who can tell something. Every day is a mini-quest! And it's very cool, not boring.

– What is the news in your area of work? Are there any new discoveries or steps to them?

– Observation of any new process in our area is a discovery. Yes, this is not the Higgs boson, for this, perhaps, you won’t receive the Nobel prize, but there are discoveries, and they happen quite often. Recently, I listened to a report of colleagues on the observation of a rare process similar to ours at a meeting of the Standard model group in ATLAS. They're writing an article. This year, data processing for the entire second session of the LHC is just beginning, so we will have many more discoveries in the next few years.

– How was your work accepted at the conference?

– The LHCC conference is quite an important annual event for people working at the LHC. It presents the most interesting results published during the year, not only in physics, but also in terms of optimization and development of detectors, new and improved methods in data processing. I did a poster report on the last publication of our group, which was released in December last year. The fact that our work was chosen means that it is good and important. Also a lot of people came at the conference, showed interest, asked questions, even praised the work. It was funny when two scientists started to discuss the poster even without my participation. In the end, they decided to involve me in this discussion, probably for the sake of decency.

– Were there any interesting reports for you at the conference?

– Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had to stand near my stand, I was able to look through other reports only before the beginning, when not all the speakers were in place. It was there where I first noticed an interesting report on the new method of analysis, wrote links to publications, and now we have already started to apply this method in our work.