Armin's personal Blog

So I arrived back in Germany on Sunday morning. I had a great time in the US where I finished two projects at Duke: I investigated Super-K's capabilities to detect supernovae (with special regard to correlation with a Gravitational Wave signal), and I investigated whether and under which circumstances a supernova location can be determined from neutrino oscillation in Earth matter. There is a report for the former and a paper (my first \o/) for the second. I learned about and used the ROOT data analysis toolkit for these. It's very powerful, but also very ugly API-wise.

I also travelled a bit. Major visits include the Great Smokies, Kitty Hawk at the Outer Banks, Raleigh, Norfolk, Washington D.C and Pleasure Island/Wilmington. Until I find a good place to put the photos on (I tried flickr, though I probably need to resize the pictures and make a selection to get things up there in one month or two because of the 100MB/month limit, and I'm also not sure how this 200 Pictures/Photostream limitation actually works) you can also have a look at some albums of Ruggero Golini who, amogst others, accompanied me on some of the trips.

Looking forward, my seventh semester at the KIT (formerly Universität Karlsruhe) has begun. I take courses on statistics and data analysis, experimental particle physics and cosmology. Luckily there was nothing on Monday so I could recover from jetlag. Being in the US also meant I was not able to take any exams at that time but I'm still pretty confident I can take all three remaining exams (Experimental physics, Theoretical physics and another more specialized physical major) during the next 10 or so months so I can start with my diploma thesis in Fall 2010.