On Tuesday, April 1, Dr. Urs Obrist, Science, Research, and Education Officer of the Embassy of Switzerland, visited TRIUMF, meeting scientists with close collaborations in Switzerland and experiencing the lab in action during a tour. Dr. Obrist was joined by officials from the Consulates General of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal as well as Dr. Christian Simm, the leader of Swissnex San Francisco, a Swiss initiative linking North American and Swiss interests in science, art, education, and innovation.
The delegation was welcomed by TRIUMF CEO/CAO Jim Hanlon, along with several researchers from the ATLAS and ALPHA collaborations (based out of CERN in Geneva). Pierre-André Amaudruz, a Swiss native and current leader of TRIUMF's Data Acquisition Group, was also on hand for the visit. He shared the path that brought him to TRIUMF in 1988 from the Paul Sherrer Institut, a physics laboratory between Basel and Zurich which shares some similar research interests with TRIUMF.
TRIUMF's connections with Switzerland are broad and well established. TRIUMF is an active part of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, contributing in several areas to the design and construction of both the LHC and the ATLAS detector. TRIUMF also helps to process some of the tens of millions of collisions captured every second by the detector, as part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. TRIUMF is home to one of ten ATLAS Tier-1 Data Centres which directly store the petabytes of data produced by the ATLAS detector annually. Many research scientists, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows at TRIUMF are engaged in analyzing the data produced by the ATLAS detector, providing frequent occasions for travel between Vancouver and Geneva.
The ALPHA experiment is another collaboration based out of CERN in which TRIUMF plays an important role. The ALPHA experiment seeks to discover what happened to "the lost half of the universe" by determining whether there is a difference in the properties of matter versus antimatter. The approach taken by the ALPHA collaboration is to compare a well-known system in physics, the hydrogen atom, with its antimatter counterpart, antihydrogen. Earlier this year, the ALPHA-Canada team, which comprises more than 1/3 of the ALPHA group, was awarded the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award.
During his visit, Dr. Obrist consulted TRIUMF researchers about how to enhance future collaboration between Canada and Switzerland. As Science, Research, and Education Officer, it is his mission is to develop bilateral relations and cooperation with Switzerland, promote Swiss science and technology, and support collaboration between Swiss and Canadian science partners.
TRIUMF was pleased to welcome Dr. Obrist and the Swiss delegation to our lab! We look forward to new opportunities in the future to advance Canadian and Swiss collaboration.
-Lindsay Kroes, Communications Assistant
First image: The Swiss officials on tour.
Second image: Dr. Christian Simm, Swissnex San Francisco, and Hans-Peter Willi, Deputy Consul General of Vancouver.