Yesterday, I had the great pleasure and privelege of presenting BaBar’s recent work on the bottomonium system to an audience at the MIT Lab for Nuclear Science Colloquium. This was my first colloquium, and I’m told it went quite well. I got some great questions afterward, which I intend to bootstrap back into my talk to shore it up for the next time around (about a week from now). I had the chance to sit with some old colleagues and some I had not met before, including another Steve with whom I have been slightly out of geographic phase for about 10 years. That was funky.
One of the bits of great fun I had yesterday was to be taken down to the basement laboratory where the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber, or DMTPC, is being designed and upgraded. DMTPC is a fairly new player in the dark matter detection world, but its plans are aggressive and the collaboration is clearly enthusiastic about scaling their technology up, up, up. The laboratory is apparently called “the dungeon” by students, due to its location underground in a rather typical, old research building.
I have a few days now to focus on my research, in relative peace and quiet, before I leave for Syracuse on Sunday.
