This weekend marks the final shifts of the BaBar experiment and the final operations of the PEP-II collider. The last few months have been among the most personally exciting time of my life, a time in collider physics that I had been led to believe was long dead. Of course, this was bittersweet – to turn the eye of the collider to resonances below the Upsilon(4S) wouldn’t have been as strongly in the cards had not the Congress cut high-energy physics funding in last year’s omnibus bill.
I’ll be on shift this weekend, so I’ll try to post some thoughts on the last few days of the collider as they happen. It’s going to be very difficult for me. Jodi is planning to join me on shift and even whip up some food for the occasion.
Will the U.S. flavor era soon be over? With PEP-II going offline leaving KEK and BES as the last flavor machines, and without a clear vision for the landscape of high energy physics in the U.S., this may mark the last days of the explosive flavor physics era in this country. I only hope and pray that the coming plan for U.S. High Energy Physics, from our peer review process, won’t suck. Nothing kills a field faster than a plan that is subject to the negative “Black Swan”.
More about that last comment later.
