It’s conference season again for particle physics. We’ve just passed through the period known as the “Winter Conferences” — Lake Louise, La Thuile, and Moriond are notable highlights from that period. BaBar unveiled the discovery of D-meson matter/antimatter mixing at Moriond, and one can expect many experiments to similarly unveil their finds in the next cycle: the summer.
As I’ve mentioned before, we particle physicists are most busy in the winter and summer. This may or may not correspond to the periods when faculty are on break from their teaching responsibilities, but for whatever reason we pander to the big conferences in these two seasons. Marking the spring are events like the APS conference, starting in another week, and the big one for BaBar: Flavor Physics and CP-violation, or FPCP. This is a chance for all that great work that didn’t finish in time for winter to showcase ahead of the summer conferences, or setup the summer conference cycle with a few teases.
I myself am off to APS in Jacksonville next week, where I’m to chair a session, present a talk (in my own session – NOT MY IDEA), and present a poster. The theme: penguins. Well, of the “radiative photon” variety. So-called because of their resemblence to a penguin under the influence of an illicit substance, penguin diagrams describe how fundamental particles conspire to create rare and wonderful patterns of decay in nature. They are complex and beautiful, rich in structure and painful to compute. Needless to say, it’s going to be fun to talk about them in Jacksonville.
