This past week was immensely fruitful for my research. It was also the week where I was really able to concretely identify the road toward solving the problem of the worst background in my research. Let’s refresh a bit.
I’m looking for invisible decays of the “Upsilon meson”:http://pdg.lbl.gov/2004/listings/mxxxcomb.html#mesonsbbbarres. Suppress your giggles! The decay of Upsilons into visible particles is a tale long since told, but it’s expected decays into neutrinos have never been thoroughly probed. That’s what I am hoping to do.
“Invisible” here means that the Upsilon’s energy is transformed into some lighter particles which, while quite real, are not detectable with the BaBar detector. That’s how you define invisible. The neutrino has already taught us that just because it’s hard to see doesn’t mean it isn’t there. My hope is that the decay of the Upsilon into such hard-to-detect states is not limited only to the neutrino, but also includes some new exotic particle that might open up a new path to understanding the universe.
But there’s a big problem here: you have to have a perfectly hermitic detector in order to be sure that a particle, once created, *would have been detected*. In the real world, detectors have gaps or regions where there is no coverage. That means that decays of the Upsilon into things like a pair of electrons or muons could **fake** the invisible signal if both leptons go into a region of zero coverage.
So I spent the week thinking about how to measure what I cannot see, by relating what I do measure to what I can’t measure. I had some mental breakthroughs on this in the last few days. Hey, perhaps they were obvious to others but they weren’t so obvious to me.
In other news, I’ve spent the day consuming the large amounts of Spongebob delivered to my by Netflix. Ah, Spongebob. The irreverence is such a delight. I’ve also been playing around with the iPod my wife got for storing her work data. I figure while she’s out of town at the Soudan mine, it can’t hurt to put a little music on it. And not just a little music… a little music using LINUX! Indeed, I’ve been using “gtkpod”:http://gtkpod.sf.net to move a bunch of our ripped CDs over to the iPod. Now I’m writing this while listening to a so-called “podcast” of “Le Show”:http://www.harryshearer.com/leshow/ from last weekend.
I’ve also gotten in my long walk for the day in the surrounding hills, and now I’ve got this blogging thing to fill the void left by Jodi’s world travel. Sigh.
In the news of the weird, I saw that the “story about the Russian woman suing NASA to stop the Deep Impact mission is still making headlines, though the number of lines in the article is shorter than it used to be”:http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2005/06/25/news/world/cfe9f857345ff3578725702a006a99b1.txt.
Hard to believe that’s still even news. Oh, hey, that reminds me! NASA’s mission is scheduled to impact comet Tempel-1 on July 4!
