August is a “dead month” for my collaboration, on a variety of levels. This is the standard European vacation season, so ~half of my collaboration is winking in and out of existence. This happens to be a month I **don’t** like to vacate, mostly because it’s quiet and I can get some work done.
Therein lies the problem. It turns out that looking for invisible decays of bottomonium is hard (SURPRISE!). No, I mean really hard. An electron-positron collider is a fickle mistress, producing all sorts of low-energy crap. In turn, a particle detector that doesn’t cover the full solid angle is like a moth-eaten sweater in a blizzard. That combination makes looking for a meaningful photon, some low energy hadrons, and nothing pretty damn hard. I promised myself I’d see this through to the end of August before dropping it. Not much time left to make progress now…
So I’m shopping for another project. I want to work on something interesting and meaningful. I have an extra constraint that, as co-convener of a BaBar working group, I would like to have a project of value to that group. That turns out to be a narrow spectrum of work, when you consider that leptonic decays of bottom and charm comprise a small fraction of the b/c meson branching fractions.
September will bring some relief. My good buddy Eric Danton will be gracing my abode with his bodacious presence. That’s right, Eric… I said BODACIOUS. There will be such rocking while he is here in California that the West Coast will be too pooped to party when all is said and done. And there will be much gnashing of teeth. Oh, yes. Gnashing.
Sigh. I need more work.
