Well, it’s that time again: time to collaborate in person. BaBar has its autumn collaboration meeting this week, starting tomorrow morning. I have so much work to do before I present in a few days. God. That one month trip was great, but things have a tendency to pile up when your hotel internet sucks and you’re busy meeting colleagues during the day. I can’t complain, but this week I will.
Monday is a break in the action (kind of): we have a BaBar symposium, celebrating the life of the experiment, topped off with a public lecture by a colleague of mine. The topic: antimatter. BaBar and Belle figure prominently in confirming the view of the world put forth by some recent Nobel prize winners.
The view is simple. In order to explain CP violation, you have to have at least three generations of matter. In realizing this, Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted the existence of the bottom and top quarks. As well, all the CP violation you can measure in the quark system is explainable by this three-generation view. It’s been a thrill to be part of confirming that picture – I had the pleasure (and, to be sure, the pain) of being involved in the very first CP violation measurement of the BaBar experiment. I was a green grad at the time, but I played my part and I learned a lot.
For now, it’s back to the world series.
