This award supports student participation in XII International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) School/Workshop on Instrumentation in Elementary Particle Physics to be held at the Universidad de Los Andes (UNIANDES), Bogota, Colombia, from November 25 through December 6, 2013. The XII ICFA School/Workshop is one of the regular series of schools held approximately every two years in countries outside of the highly industrialized parts of the world, which are Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan.
The ICFA Schools provide an outstanding opportunity for young research students at the graduate level to learn the latest in state of the art techniques in instrumentation and to meet and develop contacts and links with their peers in an international setting that benefits all geographic regions. Members of the ICFA Instrumentation Panel serve as the international advisors for all ICFA Schools/Workshops, ensuring that the quality of the scientific program meets very high standards as evidenced by the success of the previous workshops in this series.
The ICFA schools are broader impacts in action. U.S. physicists working in the field of high energy physics find themselves working in an international setting wherever they are based. Working side by side in the laboratory exercises with students from all over the world gives U.S. students international experience at an early stage in their careers. These early peer contacts are invaluable in developing future scientific collaboration.
The XII ICFA School is supported by the Elementary Particle Physics Program with co-funding from the ISE Global Venture Fund of the Office of International and Integrative Activities.
The funds received through this award represented most of the U.S. contribution to the XII International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) School/Workshop on Instrumentation in Elementary Particle Physics, which was held at the Universidad de Los Andes (UNIANDES) in Bogota, Colombia, from November 25 through December 6, 2013. Support for these international workshops is provided in about equal measure by the U.S., CERN, and the host country, in this case, Colombia. The U.S. funds were used to provide participant support to eleven U.S. students and to eleven students from other countries in the Western Hemisphere. A number of those supported were Colombians working in the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere in Latin America outside Colombia. The goals of the school/workshop were well met by the planned activities. The intellectual merit was evident in the program that was planned by the three main organizers in collaboration with the ICFA Panel on Instrumentation, Dr. Ariella Cattai of CERN, who is the chair of the Panel, Dr. Marleigh Sheaff, the PI on this award, who is the Secretary of the Panel, and Dr. Carlos Avila, who acted as the School/Workshop Director. Dr. Avila is Head of the Department of Physics at UNIANDES. He was also the chairman of a very effective local committee. In addition to lecture courses on modern instrumentation techniques presented by recognized experts in the field of detector development for particle physics, there were nine "hands-on" laboratory exercises in which students could learn by participation rather than simply by observation. The feedback from the students in the evaluation questionnaire they were asked to fill out at the end of the workshop indicated that they would prefer more of these laboratories even at the expense of some lectures and special talks. However, the evaluation questionnaires also indicated that all lectures and talks were at about the right level and of the correct length. The program was planned to address a perceived need in the training of today's particle physics students. Because experiments have grown so large, and because many students join them after the apparatus is already in place, opportunities to learn about instrumentation techniques are, in many cases, not part of the education received. The goal was to broaden the education of the graduate students who participated so they would have an appreciation for the limitations of the apparatus on which their experiment generated data and be better prepared to develop new detectors for future efforts in particle physics. This goal was clearly met. Beyond the obvious learning opportunity provided by these activities, there was the opportunity for students from the various countries to get to know one another and to discover that they share many of the same goals. Modern experiments in the field are much larger and much more international than in the past. Students need to be comfortable in this setting., which makes international opportunities like this one so important in their training. For those who decide to pursue a somewhat different career path, the skills learned in this workshop are useful in any technical field.
