Crazy. And there’s not enough time in the day to suffer crazy. Why are things crazy? Well, I’m in the honorable position of giving three presentations in the next three weeks (not one a week, or I’d be less stressed). This Thursday night I head to Fermilab to attend a collaboration meeting for the Braidwood experiment, where (among other things) we will discuss the preparations needed for our upcoming review. One of the topics is background rejection, and particularly the muon veto shield on the outside of our proposed detector. I’m likely going to give an overview of our veto simulation, done using “GEANT4”:http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/asd/geant4/geant4.html, as well as our first results on expected background fluxes.
At the end of May, I’m off to Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee to present two talks at the Frontiers in Contemporary Physics Conference. One talk will be very specifically searches for decays of B mesons into leptons, which is a physics topic I co-convene on the BaBar experiment. This is a straight-forward talk, but the big trick is to compress three detailed recent results into 20 minutes. Whew.
The second talk at Vanderbilt is a comprehensive overview of the Braidwood experiment proposal. This is the real nail-biter. I’ve never given a talk about an experiment that doesn’t exist, and since our colleagues with competing proposals will be there, too, I want to know my stuff backward and forward. Since I am fairly new to reactor-based neutrino physics, I’ve got to sweat this one out.
What’s needed is strategy. Since the BaBar talk is the “easiest”, I’m writing that first. I have a scheduled practice talk next Monday, so that’s a good deadline. I’ll write the simulation presentation second, since that’s pretty detailed work in which I’ve been completely immersed. Finally, I’ll clear my head and pound out the Braidwood overview, since that’s the hardest and I want to be undistracted when I work on it.
Crazy!
