The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

I am a positron

The past two days have been full of discussions about the B-Factories Legacy Book. This book, targeted for publication in 2012, will contain a coherent record of the work of the two B-factories: Belle and BaBar. As a member of the BaBar collaboration, I am keenly interested in seeing a digested picture of the flavor sector. I am also a co-editor of the Bottomonium section; along with my Belle colleague, we will craft and coordinate the writing of this important part of our experiments’ legacies.

bflb_photoThis meeting drew participants from across the globe, spanning all of the continents except Africa and Antarctica (at least, as far as I know based on the participants list). We’ll meet again next year, after the writing has started. It’s a long process, but we’ll all have to be vigilant as new results appear and new relationships are (potentially) revealed by the work of the LHC. The difficult part will be to distill the book into something that can be approached by a starting graduate student, while still being informative to the highest levels of interest. Of course, in achieving that balance we also must be attentive to the length of this thing; the target is 1000 pages, but it’s really unclear just how realistic that goal is right now.

After the meeting, I did some work in preparation for the coming week’s Collaboration meeting. Before dinner, I headed out for a jog. I always mean to jog when I come here but somehow never manage to do it. I’ll either forget my running shoes at the hotel, forget a towel, forget a change of clothes – you name it. Today, I managed to forget none of those things and so I set out for a nice run. I started around the loop road, then entered the accelerator area and ran the PEP road. In total, this took me just over 2 miles. Considering I am not running regularly any more, this was a pretty nice achievement for me. It gives me confidence that if I keep at it, I can work up to a good pace for a 5k run sometime in the near future.

Meanwhile, you can see my route below, thanks to gmaps-pedometer [1]!

[1] http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

run