“A unique opportunity”

Doing research at UZH is a dream come true for Sophia Xiao: “I’d always wanted to go to Europe, but during my studies in the States I couldn’t get away,” says the bright and cheerful physicist. Then she got the opportunity to apply for EuroScholars, a program enabling talented students from the US and Canada to do research at a European LERU (League of European Research Universities) university.

The nine research universities involved include Geneva and Zurich in Switzerland. Sophia Xiao applied, was accepted, and chose UZH. She still remembers the day she arrived in Zurich from Virginia last August. Tens of thousands of people had flocked to the city for the Street Parade. “And I always thought you only found such massive crowds in China,” she laughs. Of course she now realizes that the huge party was an exception, but she likes the city, and the university, on normal days as well.

Big or small?

She chose the University of Zurich because of the opportunities it presented for research in particle physics. In the US, Sophia studied physics and astronomy, graduating with a bachelor’s from the University of Virginia.

Torn between the subatomic world of particle physics and the immensity of the universe, for her further studies she opted to focus on elementary particles. She was attracted by the exciting projects on offer at UZH. Under the EuroScholars Program she can be involved in experiments with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator at CERN. “It’s a unique opportunity to get experience,” she says.

The talented young researcher from Shenzhen works in a research group headed by Florencia Canelli. The group is investigating the decay of elementary particles at the LHC’s CMS detector, a machine as tall as a house, where in July 2013 physicists, in the experiment of the century, were able to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. The aim of Canelli’s latest study is to describe the characteristics of the Higgs particle in more detail, and in particular how it relates to another particle called the top quark.

Sophia Xiao is involved in the software used to measure the results from the detector. This requires sophisticated control systems; Sophia is currently working on this on Irchel Campus with other physicists on the programs.

European get-together in Zurich

“I love this work, and I made a good choice,” she says. Sophia praises both the research project and the inspiring atmosphere on campus. She’s particularly excited about the range of sports offered by the Academic Sports Association Zurich (ASVZ), notably kickboxing, archery, and fencing. The social life is good, too. Every semester the students on the EuroScholars Program meet at one of the participating universities; last fall it was the turn of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Now the University of Zurich is to play host to the Midstay Meeting this week, from 19 to 22 April. In the next few days students on the program will be presenting their projects and getting to know UZH and the city of Zurich.

As far as Sophia Xiao is concerned, her next steps are preordained: This fall she’ll embark on a PhD at an American university. With offers from Caltech, Princeton, and Yale, she’s spoiled for choice.