This spring I passed my qualifying exam, which is a fairly intimidating part of many American PhD programs, which among many other things marks the difference between a "PhD student" and a "PhD candidate." While the specifics of the exam vary across different fields and between universities, my exam and many others in physics consist of a roughly hour-long presentation on current research to establish competency in your field. I chose to base my presentation on an ongoing long-lived particles analysis, specifically focusing on muonic background in our data and how we design vetos to reject cosmic ray muons.
I won't be able to share the full slides of my presentation since they include some ATLAS internal data and ongoing analysis work. However, I enjoyed taking the time to learn much more about how the detector works under the hood and got to produce some diagrams of the detector in TikZ and wanted to share them here. Below are some of the graphics I produced for my analysis or the qualifying exam, but all of them can be found on my github here in PDF form as well as the corresponding TeX code to produce them.
